A case study of two NRL Pump prototypes

As computer systems become more open and interconnected, the need for reliable and secure communication also increases. The NRL (Naval Research Laboratory) Pump was introduced by Kang and Moskowitz (1993) to balance the requirements of reliability, congestion control, fairness and good performance against those of threats from covert channels and denial-of-service attacks. In this paper, we describe two prototype efforts. One (the event-driven Pump or E-Pump) implements the Pump at the process (top) layer in terms of a 4-layer network reference model, and the other (the DOS-Pump or D-Pump) implements the Pump at the transport layer. We then discuss lessons learned and how these lessons are to be used in deciding upon the final hardware implementation of the Pump.