Secure Network Programming: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 01:48, 30 May 2021

Revision as of 07:25, 5 November 2021

Line 2:

'''Secure Network Programming''' (SNP) is a prototype of the first [[Secure Sockets Layer]], 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 |pages=55–71 |doi=10.1109/32.263755 |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 (NSA INFOSEC University Research Program grant no. MDA 904-91-C-7046, 1991-1994). 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.

Toward the goal of "secure network programming for the masses," the inventors of SNP conceived secure sockets as a high-level abstraction suitable for securing Internet applications. In 1993, they designed and built a prototype of SNP. Designed as an application sublayer on top of sockets, SNP provides a user interface closely resembling sockets. This resemblance was by design so that security could be retrofitted into existing socket programs with only minor modifications. Also, with such a sublayer carefully designed and its implementation thoroughly debugged, it can be easily used by any Internet application that uses sockets for end-to-end communications. This is a natural idea in hindsight but, in 1993, it was novel and a major departure from mainstream network security research at that time.