Efficiently providing secure multimedia conferencing in SEC

Security is a critical consideration for an enterprise communications system. Different work contexts and corporate cultures may have different security requirements. In fact, such requirements may range from "no security" to protection from all possible attacks. In addition, as a communications session progresses, its context may dynamically change, and its security requirements may need to be changed accordingly. In this paper, we present our approach to providing security in enterprise communications in an efficient manner and report on the results of our initial performance study, which shows that encrypting and decrypting real-time media payloads end-to-end does not significantly degrade the quality of the end-user experience in real-time communications. Our approach is implemented in an enterprise communications system, called SEC, which is designed to enable enterprise employees to conduct secure, spontaneous, multimedia, and multi-party conferencing.