A Basis for Secure Communication in Large Distributed Systems

We propose a secure communication architecture for distributed systems that puts security below the transport level, and uses host-to-host rather than process-to-process secure channels. We argue that this provides the same level of end-to-end security as putting security at higher levels, and that it can simplify and improve the performance of transport protocols. The architecture is designed for very large distributed systems, which in general have security requirements beyond those of LAN-based systems.