ISCP: design and implementation of an inter-domain security management agent (SMA) coordination protocol

This research is supported by the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract DABT63-97-C-0045. Abstract Many security mechanisms and protocols have been developed to handle security problems in various circumstances. This trend has created a heterogeneous security environment for today's global Internet. Although most of security functions and modules can be managed “individually” through SNMP, very little has been researched in coordinating a set of distributed security modules to provide and manage an "End-to-End" security service. In order to support service management for network security, in this paper, we developed the ISCP protocol (Inter-Domain Security Management Agent Coordination Protocol) to communicate security capability and policy information among the security management agents in each policy domain. ISCP is designed with good scalability, interoperability, extensibility and security. Performance evaluation using our ISCP prototype implementation are also presented.