Secure Network Programming: Difference between revisions

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'''Secure Network Programming''' (SNP) is a prototype of the first [[secureSecure socketsSockets layerLayer]], designed and built by the Networking Research Laboratory at [[the University of Texas at Austin]], led by [[Simon S. Lam]]. This work was published in the 1994 USENIX Summer Technical conference <ref name="SNP-USENIX">{{cite journal |last1=Woo |first1=Thomas |last2=Bindignavle |first2=Raghuram |last3=Su |first3=Shaowen |last4=Lam |first4=Simon |title=SNP: An Interface for Secure Network Programming |journal=Proceedings USENIX Summer Technical Conference |date=June 1994 |url=http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/lam/Vita/Cpapers/WBSL94.pdf |accessdate=21 July 2019}}</ref>. For this project, the authors won the 2004 [[ACM Software System Award]].

This work began in 1991 as a theoretical investigation by the Networking Research Laboratory on the formal meaning of a protocol layer satisfying an upper interface specification as a service provider and a lower interface specification as a service consumer <ref>{{cite journal |last1=Lam |first1=Simon |last2=Shankar |first2=Udaya |title=A Theory of Interfaces and Modules I — Composition Theorem |journal=IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering |date=January 1994 |volume=20 |url=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=631099 |accessdate=21 July 2019}}</ref>. The Networking Research Laboratory received a grant from the National Security Agency in June 1991 to investigate how to apply their theory of modules and interfaces to security verification. At that time, there were three well-known authentication systems built (MIT's [[Kerberos_(protocol)|Kerberos]]) or being developed (DEC's SPX and IBM's KryptoKnight). All of these systems 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. For example, it would take a tremendous amount of effort to “kerberize” an existing distributed application.