Where have all the protocols gone?

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    There was a time when security protocols lived mainly in the network and transport layers. Where are they now?
    Some have moved downstairs, towards the physical layer. What used to be a wide-area authentication or session establishment protocol is now a very local interaction with a trusted device, such as a tamper-evident smartcard, or a biometric token.
    Indeed, in some cases a piece of mobile hardware has actually replaced altogether the security protocol that we used to find. Now in the strict sense, there is still a security protocol here: we use a set of rules to construct an artefact which will then be moved into a different context and interpreted in accordance with a shared set of conventions. But the individual protocol run no longer involves the same kind of electronic message-passing that we used to see or rather, as Marshall McLuhan would have said, the medium is now the message.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)1-2
    Number of pages2
    JournalLecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)
    Volume3364
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2005

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