Securing data transfer in asynchronous transfer mode networks

Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), which can provide integrated services of various media types and bit rates, is rapidly becoming the dominant technology for local and wide area information transport. In this paper we present a network security architecture for secure data transfer in ATM networks. The proposed architecture facilitates seamless integration of security services into the existing ATM architecture and conforms to the ATM B-ISDN PRM: security related signaling functionality, such as mutual end system authentication, establishment of security associations, and cryptographic key distributions are carried out in the control plane, while protection of user traffic is achieved by defining a data protection layer in the user plane.