A primary obstacle in the path to successful commercial Internet utilization
is the lack of adequate security. Strong security algorithms create
tremendous processing overheads and are often omitted in the interest of
application performance. If electronic commerce applications are to
succeed, then they cannot compromise performance or security. We present
Authenticast, an adaptive, user-level authenticated transmission protocol to
facilitate a resource utilization balance which enables the existence of
high-performance applications with sufficient security to be executed over a
public communications medium. Our solution comprises the following
contributions:
We present the addition of a security allocation parameter, securityLevel,
to the Quality of Service (QoS) specification.
We introduce the concept of the Security Thermostat to depict Authenticast's
dynamic runtime modification of securityLevel based on user requirements or
desires.
We present the design and implementation of the Authenticast protocol to
interface with the "thermostat" concept and facilitate parameter changes
during application execution
