Cryptography as a Network Service

Short Description
Cryptography is a powerful tool for building secure dis- … This is especially true for public key cryptography. Con-. ventional wisdom dictates that …

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Cryptography as a Network Service
Tom Berson Drew Dean Matt Franklin.. Diana Smetters Michael Spreitzer?
Xerox PARC?Xerox PARC U.C. Davis Xerox PARC IBM Research
berson@parc.xerox.com ddean@parc.xerox.com franklin@cs.ucdavis.edu smetters@parc.xerox.com mspreitz@us.ibm.com
Abstract
Cryptography is a powerful tool for building secure distributed
systems, albeit at substantial computational cost.
This is especially true for public key cryptography. Conventional
wisdom dictates that cryptography must be done
locally in order to be secure. We argue for an approach in
which public key cryptographic operations are provided
as a network service. This service operates over longlived
associations secured by symmetric cryptography.
This network architecture amortizes the cost of specialpurpose
cryptographic hardware across many users. We
describe the implementation of such a system, and performance
results we obtained.
1. Introduction
The received wisdom about cryptography is that it is
difficult and expensive. This has led to system designs
and engineering tradeoffs that aim to minimize the use of
cryptography, and especially of public-key operations, because
they are computationally intensive.
But this received wisdom is no longer true. A great
many influences have already made cryptography easy
and cheap, and…