Antigone: A Flexible Framework for Secure Group Communication

Many emerging applications on the Internet requiring group communication have varying securi-ty requirements. Significant strides have been made in achieving strong semantics and security guarantees within group environments. However, in existing solutions, the scope of available se-curity policies is often limited. This paper presents Antigone, a framework that provides a suite of mechanisms from which flexible application security policies may be implemented. With Antigone, developers may choose a policy that best addresses their security and performance requirements. We describe the Antigone’s mechanisms, consisting of a set of micro-protocols, and show how different security policies can be implemented using those mechanisms. We also present a performance study illustrating the security/performance tradeoffs that can be made using Antigone