Networking Research Laboratory
Department of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
Project director:
Simon S. Lam
(more publications)
Network Security Services
Our research is on security services for emerging Internet
applications characterized by real-time packet flows, large-scale multicasts,
and high-speed transmission. We investigate architectures and
protocols for securing groups and flows with emphasis on efficiency,
latency, and scalability, in addition to the security concerns of
confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity.
To provide secure group communications on the Internet, a
key management service is needed to distribute and maintain a
group key shared by group members. For scalable implementation of
such a service, we invented the
key tree approach. We designed and implemented a scalable and reliable
group key management service
(Keystone),
a flow signing/verification service
(FlowSign),
and a digital signature algorithm
(eFFS)
which provides both fast signing and fast verification.
Our prior contributions to network security services include
novel protocols
for secure bootstrapping, client-server authentication, and user-host
authentication using a smart card, as well as a new language
for authorization (named GACL).
We developed a formal model and methodology for
verifying security protocols based upon
state transition semantics. We used them to specify and verify our client-server
authentication protocol. Our model was later used
by Clarke's group at CMU to develop a model checker for security protocols.
While verifying security protocols in 1991-92, we observed that security systems at that
time (MIT's Kerberos, DEC's SPX, and IBM's KryptoKnight) all suffered from a
common drawback, namely, they did not export a clean and easy-to-use interface
that could be readily used by Internet applications. We invented secure
sockets as an alternative to
Kerberos, widely installed in those days. Kerberos was based upon
symmetric key cryptography, and it would take a tremendous amount of effort to "kerberize"
an existing distributed application. SNP, on the other hand, was designed to make use of public key cryptography
for authentication and to resemble the Berkeley sockets interface
for client-server applications.
We invented secure sockets for Internet applications in general, independently
and concurrently with the design and development of the HTTP protocol for the
world-wide web (WWW) which was still in its infancy in 1993. In
1993, we also designed and built the
first secure sockets layer, named Secure Network Programming (SNP).
This work was published in the USENIX Summer Technical conference in a paper
presented on June 8, 1994 [0].
In the paper, we articulated the case for secure sockets as a high-level
abstraction suitable for securing Internet applications and demonstrated the
practicality of a secure sockets layer with performance measurement results.
Subsequent secure sockets
layers (SSL by Netscape and TLS by IETF), re-implemented several years later
using key ideas first presented in SNP, enabled secure e-commerce between
browsers and servers. (Netscape was founded as a company on April 4, 1994 to
develop a browser.) Today, many Internet applications (including email
applications) use
HTTPS which consists of HTTP running over a secure sockets layer.
For this contribtion, we won the
2004 ACM Software System Award (prior winners
include Unix, TCP/IP, and WWW).
Publications
-
Efficient Group Rekeying Using Application Layer Multicast
X.
Brian Zhang, Simon S. Lam, and Huaiyu Liu
In Proceedings of 25th
IEEE ICDCS, Columbus, Ohio, June 2005.
-
Group Rekeying with Limited Unicast Recovery
X. Brian Zhang, Simon S. Lam, and Dong-Young Lee
Technical Report TR-02-36, July 2002 (revised, February 2003);
an
abbreviated version in Proceedings IEEE ICC 2003,
Anchorage, Alaska, May 2003; a
revised version in Computer
Networks, 2004.
-
Protocol Design for Scalable and Reliable Group Rekeying
X. Brian Zhang, Simon S. Lam, Dong-Young Lee, and Y. Richard Yang
In Proceedings SPIE Conference on Scalability and Traffic Control
in IP Networks, Denver, CO, August 2001;
revised version in
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, December 2003.
-
Reliable Group Rekeying: A Performance Analysis
Y. Richard Yang, X. Steve Li, X. Brian Zhang, and Simon S. Lam
In Proceedings ACM SIGCOMM 2001, San Diego, August 2001;
technical report version.
-
Batch Rekeying for Secure Group Communications
X. Steve Li, Y. Richard Yang, Mohamed Gouda, and Simon S. Lam
In Proceedings 10th International World Wide Web
Conference, Hong Kong, China, May 2001.
- Keystone: A Group Key Management Service
Chung Kei Wong and Simon S. Lam
In Proceedings International Conference
on Telecommunications, Acapulco, Mexico, May 2000
(postscript file).
- Digital Signatures for Flows and Multicasts
Chung Kei Wong and Simon S. Lam
Technical Report TR-98-15, May 31, 1998;
revised, June 14, 1999, in
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, August 1999
(postscript file); an
early version in
Proceedings IEEE ICNP '98, October 1998.
- Secure Group Communications Using Key Graphs
Chung Kei Wong, Mohamed G. Gouda, and Simon S. Lam
Technical Report TR-97-23, July 28, 1997; revised version
in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Feb. 2000.
Another revised version
in Proceedings ACM SIGCOMM '98
(postscript file).
- Designing a Distributed Authorization Service
Thomas Y.C. Woo and Simon S. Lam
Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM '98, San Francisco, March 1998
(postscript file).
- Authentication for distributed systems
Thomas Y.C. Woo and Simon S. Lam
In Internet Besieged: Countering Cyberspace Scofflaws , Dorothy Denning and
Peter Denning (eds.), Addison-Wesley and ACM Press Books, 1998
(postscript file);
note that copyright year is 1998 instead of 1997 shown herein.
Book version (5 Mbytes).
An earlier version
published in Computer, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 39-52, January 1992;
with corrigendum in Computer,
vol. 25, no. 3, page 10, March 1992
(first publication of client-server authentication protocol in SNP)
- SNP: An Interface for Secure Network Programming,
Thomas Y.C. Woo, Raghuram Bindignavle, Shaowen Su and Simon S. Lam
Proc. USENIX '94 Summer Technical Conference,
Boston, June 1994
(postscript file);
publication of the first secure sockets layer.
- Design, verification and implementation of an authentication
protocol
Thomas Y.C. Woo and Simon S. Lam
Proc. IEEE Int. Conference on Network Protocols,
Boston, October 1994
(postscript file);
verification of protocol implemented in SNP.
-
Authorization in distributed systems: A new approach
Thomas Y.C. Woo and Simon S. Lam
Journal of Computer Security, 1994
(postscript file).
- A lesson in authentication protocol design
Thomas Y.C. Woo and Simon S. Lam
ACM Operating Systems Review, vol. 28, no. 3, 1994
(postscript file).
- A framework for distributed authorization
Thomas Y.C. Woo and Simon S. Lam
Proc. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security,
Fairfax, Virginia, November 1993
(postscript file).
- Verifying authentication protocols: Methodology and example
Thomas Y. C. Woo and Simon S. Lam
Proc. IEEE Int. Conference on Network Protocols,
San Francisco, October 1993
(postscript file).
- A semantic model for authentication protocols
Thomas Y. C. Woo and Simon S. Lam
Proc. IEEE Symposium on Research in Security and Privacy,
Oakland, May 1993
(postscript file).
- Authorization in distributed systems: A formal approach
Thomas Y.C. Woo and Simon S. Lam
Proc. IEEE Symposium on Research in Security and Privacy,
Oakland, May 1992
(postscript file).
- Applying a theory of modules and interfaces to security verification
Simon S. Lam, A. Udaya Shankar, and Thomas Y. C. Woo
Proc. IEEE Symposium on Research in Security and Privacy,
Oakland, May 1991
(postscript file).