Strong Security for Active Networks

Active networks are an exciting development in networking services in which the infrastructure provides customizable network services to packets. These custom network services can be deployed by the user inside the packets themselves. Furthermore, the custom network services require that the infrastructure perform much more sophisticated operations on packets than the traditional forwarding. Consequently, there are heightened concerns from users and network operators about security. This paper discusses security requirements and issues in active networks with respect to authentication and authorization in a node. We describe our prototype implementation of a solution to those issues. We go on to describe a security architecture derived from our experience and relate our prototype to the architecture. Keywords—active networks, authorization, authentication.