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.
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 language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1-2 |
Number of pages | 2 |
Journal | Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) |
Volume | 3364 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2005 |