Security of Electronic Bonding in Multi-Domain Management Syst

This paper discusses security of management systems which have to integrate and co-operate through use of management services from different service providers. The individual management systems involved must be viewed as independent security domains, which must share common inter-domain security measures in order to communicate securely. The inter-domain security must then be standardised, preferably through a rather small set of alternatives to accommodate security requirements of varying severity. Negotiation of alternatives should be possible, although at present only negotiation of security context is possible, not negotiation of the security profile (viewed as a sub-set of the communications profile used between management entities). Available alternatives for realising security depend on the underlying management technology, and on the possibility for additions or modifications to especially the communications protocol stack. The work discussed here was developed in the TRUMPET (AC112) [TRUMPET] project, which was partially funded by the European Commission through the ACTS programme.