A Proposal for Securing Communications over ATM Networks

In February 1999, the ATM forum international consortium approved the first version of its security specifications, aiming to protect communications over Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks by offering confidentiality, integrity and authentication services for various security levels. This paper shows that this specification can be further improved if Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) is widely supported by ATM end systems. In this paper, we come up with a new proposal for securing communications over ATM networks, which initially relies on DSA. In comparison with the ATM Security Specifications Version 1.0, our proposal is more secure and efficient under the assumption that DSA is available. Key words: B-ISDN, ATM, ATM security, security services. 1