Telecommunications Software Security Architecture

Introduction

The merging of Public Swithced Telefone Network (PSTN) and Internet-like networks is currently one of the key trends in telecommunications. The Internet architecture has established itself as the leading network architecture of the '90s and it is increasingly used to carry voice, video and multimedia. Meanwhile, WWW has become the standard interface to all kinds of IP-based services. These UIs can be made quite sofisticated with the use of Java-applets within the HTML-pages.

One of the main problems in the Internet architechture and the applications built on in is the lack of security. Contrary to the public telephone network, Internet was not designed with security in mind. Therefore, security has gradually been added to the architecture. Currently, there are numerous research and standardising projects concentrating on the security of Internet.

In practice, security in an untrusted network can only be based on strong cryptography. We need a general purpose security architecture that guarantees, among other things, integrity and confidentiality on the Internet. The key questions now are authorization and access control in a global network.

Goal

The goal of the project is to develop a general purpose security architecture for Internet-like network based on strong cryptography.

Subprojects

Project has the following subprojects:

• Using SPKI certificates for access control in Java 1.2
• Implementation of ISAKMP and IKE
• Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem
• UDP/IP-protocol stack in Jacob framework
• Jacob framework.
• Usability of Computer Security
• DNS
• Electronic identification (HST).
• CORBA

Publications and other results

Links

This page is maintained by Sanna Liimatainen
This page has been updated last on the 17th of May 1999.
URL: http://www.tcm.hut.fi/Research/TeSSA/introduction.html