A high-performance capabilities-based network protocol

Abstract

Capabilities-based networks present a fundamental shift in the security design of network architectures. Instead of permitting the transmission of packets from any source to any destination, routers deny forwarding by default. For a successful transmission, packets need to positively identify themselves and their permissions to the router. A major challenge for a high-performance implementation of such a network is an efficient design of the credentials that are carried in the packet and the verification procedure on the router. Based on our prior work on the design of packet credentials, we present a network protocol that implements these concepts. Our prototype implementation shows that there is some connection setup cost associated with this type of secure communication. However, once a connection is established, the throughput performance of a capabilities-based connection is similar to that of conventional TCP.