Switchboard: secure, monitored connections for client-server communication

Abstract

Prolonged secure communication requires trust relationships that extend throughout a connection's life cycle. Current tools to establish secure connections such as SSL/TLS and SSH authenticate PKI identities, validate credentials and authorize a trust relationship at the time a connection is established, but do not monitor the trust relationship thereafter To maintain security over the duration of a prolonged connection, we extend the semantics of SSL to support continuous monitoring of a credential's liveness and the trust relationships that authorize it. Our implementation isolates trust management into a pluggable trust authorization module. We also present an initial design for a host-level secure communication resource that provides secure channels for multiple connections.