A BLOCK-BASED APPROACH TO SECURE ATM NETWORKING

Abstract

There is increasing deployment of asynchronous transmission mode of ATM as the preferred data transmission technology for network backbones as well as local area networks requiring high bandwidth and low latencies. At the same time network applications continue to be developed on packet oriented network protocols such as IP for the Internet and are mostly interactive in nature. This results in majority of the traffic on cell based ATM backbone networks to be packets and bursty in their traffic characterization. Also, protection of data transmission has become a major issue with growing awareness of both network users and operators to the potential for security failures and costs associated with such failures. Therefore, development of secure high speed network protocols that can efficiently support packet based bursty traffic on ATM networks is an important requirement. The main contribution of the research work described in this paper is a comprehensive design of a secure ATM network protocol for transmission of blocks of cells that can map to upper level protocol satisfies a range of network dat transmission security criteria as well as being efficient in its use of computational time and redundant bit space for cryptographic operations.