The design, implementation, and evaluation of cryptographic distributed applications: secure PVM

This research investigates techniques for providing privacy, authentication, and data integrity to message passing in distributed applications. Various software mechanisms for message hashing and encryption are evaluated, including techniques for key generation and key distribution. Different crypto-APIs’ are evaluated, and the distribution of a single session key for n-party communication is implemented. A secure version of PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is developed using DifRe-Heilman, MD5, and various symmetric encryption algorithms to provide message privacy, authenti-cation, and integrity. The modifications to PVM are described, and the performance of secure PVM is evaluated.