ASE: Authenticated Statement Exchange

Abstract

Applications often re-transmit the same data, such as digital certificates, during repeated communication instances. Avoiding such superfluous transmissions with caching, while complicated, may be necessary in order to operate in low-bandwidth, high-latency wireless networks or in order to reduce communication load in shared, mobile networks. This paper presents a general framework and an accompanying software library, called ``Authenticated Statement Exchange'' (ASE), for helping applications implement persistent caching of application-specific data. ASE supports secure caching of a number of pre-defined data types common to secure communication protocols and allows applications to define new data types to be handled by ASE. ASE is applicable to many applications. The paper describes the use of ASE in one such application, secure group chat. In a recent real-use deployment, ASE was instrumental in allowing secure group chat to operate over low-bandwidth satellite links.