An efficient authentication protocol for high performance networks

With the use of high performance networks (HPNs) for forthcoming commercial applications as well as communication including personal sensitive data, not only high performance in terms of bandwidth or delay from underlying communication networks become fundamental requirements, but also with ever increasing importance adequate security services. This paper discusses the tasks of authentication and key management in HPNs with respect to the main requirements performance, manageability and security. It analyses existing solutions to the problem of authentication in networks with special regards to high performance networks and proposes the use of a hybrid key hierarchy for efficient authentication and key management. The approach is validated with a prototype, that utilises the hybrid key hierarchy in a key management daemon for the IP security architecture