Combining Authentication and Lightweight Payment for Active Networks
Rüdiger Weis, Wolfgang Effelsberg, Stefan Lucks · 2000
Security functions are of critical importance for the acceptance of Active Networks in practice: network nodes must be protected from malicious code, and they should account for the cost of executing code; this also helps to prevent denial-of-service attacks. For the payment function code packets must carry some form of light-weight electronic cash. Cryptographic schemes can be used to solve both the security and the payment/resource management problem. In this paper we propose to combine cryptographic algorithms in order to solve both problems in an integrated way. Our scheme is secure, light-weight and efficient: It saves space in the packet headers, and the security is higher than that of separate algorithms for authentication and cost accounting.