Two Secure Implementations of Sockets and Their Tradeoffs

As electronic communication grows in popularity and re-places paper as an accepted official medium, the need for secure electronic communication increases. Using typical socket classes, data is sent over the network in a format so that anyone who reads the data will be able to inter-pret it correctly. Encryption is only part of the solution to this problem. The other part is getting the key needed for encryption or decryption from the client to the server or vice versa. Public key encryption does offer a solu-tion to this problem, but the computationally intensive na-ture does not provide acceptable throughput. In order to achieve acceptable throughput and still be secure certain protocols can be used to manage a session key between two computers without compromising security. This pa-per covers the implementation of two such protocols, the tradeoffs made for ease of programming and use, and the performance of each protocol on a real network. The fi-nal results find that the computation needed for public key encryption is approximately one-tenth of a second slower than trusted third party on current technology. However, a load under 100 clients could cause the trusted arbitrator’s queue for service to grow so large that public key encryp-tion could perform faster.