The design of supranet security mechanisms

This paper presents the design of a set of security mechanisms for supranets. Supranets are virtual networks-private to a group of users-that can be built on top of a physical network (e.g., the Internet) by any user of such a network making use of an appropriate software toolkit. Supranet members should feel they are part of a secure private environment from which non-members are excluded. On the other side, it may be necessary to provide the means to protect some or even all of the conversations among supranet members. This calls for the provision of a set of appropriate security mechanisms that protect supranet communications both from the outside world and within the supranet itself. This paper focuses on the main design requirements to be considered when building security mechanisms for a supranet. After the discussion of such typical networking issues as addressing, packet header format, and routing, we focused on security and showed how a set of mechanisms based on asymmetric keys cryptography can be used to address in an elegant and efficient way all the security issues considered.