Research On Secure Active Network

Active Network is a new and promising technology that provides powerful and flexible networking services. In Active Network services can be deployed by packets as they traverse the network. However, security issues have brought up great challenge and seriously baffled the development and application of Active Network. In this paper, the author introduced the fundamental principle of Active Network. By analyzing the security of Active Network and Active Packets, security solutions were put up. The mainly contributions of this paper include these following aspects: In order to guarantee the Active Packets to be correctly conveyed to the end point, all Active Packets are enveloped by ANEP and Security Associations are introduced in the ANEP header. The recourses of Active Node are divided into several classes according to their significance. Active Packets accessing to the resources are under the control of dynamic RBAC. The communications between Active Nodes are protected by IPsec protocol and Keynote trust management system. At the same time the Management Layers are in charge of the operations in the Active Nodes. By these means, an IPsec-based hop-by-hop security model is set up. Further more, the author analyzed the security of Agent-based Active Network model. In this model, Active Network is divided into different domains with each agent in each domain. Agents issue credentials to Active Packets with destinations to other domains. Because of the introduction of Agents, procedure delay is noticeably deduced and great efficiency gains in comparison with the hop-by-hop model. Finally the author summarized the security research of Active Network and proposed the open issues to be settled.