Violeta Cakulev

Secure enablement of real time applications: A novel end-to-end approach

The Internet has evolved into a multi-service Internet Protocol (IP) network with support for various types of traffic, including multimedia. Given the relatively open nature of IP networks, securely enabling multimedia services is increasingly important. While protocols such as Secure Real Time Protocol (SRTP) provide container formats for various applications, the supporting security solutions lack end-to-end secure key management. In this paper, we propose a novel secure key management framework targeted for real time applications in multi-operator environments. In particular, by leveraging an Identity-Based Authenticated Key Exchange (IBAKE) protocol, we develop secure key management solutions to support two-party communications, conferencing applications, call forking, call redirect, and deferred delivery. Our framework eliminates the need for costly public key infrastructure (PKI) or other online solutions, overcomes the problem of key escrow while providing perfect forward and backwards secrecy, and works across applications and media types. Overall, our solution opens-up new lines of research and business opportunities in secure application enablement.