Santosh Balakrishnan

The service availability forum security service (SEC): status and future directions

The Service Availability Forum is specifying high availability interfaces for carrier grade applications. Along with the direct support for applications an implementation of these interfaces implies that it can itself be highly available. To ensure this availability an implementation must be secure, but these security mechanisms must themselves not reduce the availability of the overall system [1,2]. The security of high availability interfaces (and their middleware implementations) therefore requires a careful design to address potential cross influences. In this paper, we first discuss the general security scope for SA Forum systems, do a threat analysis and list a number of assumption of the execution environment. Then, we present a strawman architecture for the SA Forum Security service (SEC). Rather than presenting a detailed design, with this architecture we attempt to provide guidance, expose issues to be addressed and offer solution ideas for those issues.