Visa Protocols for Controlling Inter-Organization Datagram Flow

The increasing use of internetworking protocols to connect administratively heterogeneous networks has raised the question of how an organization can control the flow of information across its network boundaries. One method for doing so is the use of visas, a cryptographic technique for authenticating and authorizing a flow of datagrams. This report presents and evaluates two visa protocols ---one that requires distributed state information in gateways and one that uses additional encryption operations instead of distributed state. Applications for such visa protocols include access control, accounting and billing for packet transit, and network resource management. This technical report is based, in large part, upon a shorter paper [8]. We have extended the discussion of design issues and added an appendix describing a visa protocol using dual-key (public key) encryption.