| Virtual Private Networks (VPN's), by offering an economic alternative to leased lines, are becoming widely adopted by small and medium enterprises for building private networks. VPN's like any other networks need efficient mechanisms to deploy group applications. Multicasting, by making good usage of network bandwidth, is an efficient mechanism for enabling group applications. Security is a crucial aspect in multicasting, the lack of which is currently preventing the large-scale deployment of group-oriented applications. A new networking paradigm that inserts intelligence within the network, namely active networking, has shown interesting results so far for deploying a reliable and adaptable multicast framework.; The primary objective of this thesis is to present the design of a Secure Active Multicast (SAM) architecture for VPN's along with a sample implementation running on the Packet Language for Active Networks (PLAN) architecture.; The secondary objective is to present two extensions to the functionality of PLAN: the design of a C-Bridge that allows PLAN developers to implement services in C instead of OCaml, and a fix to an oversight that produces data corruption when deploying PLAN applications written in Java. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
