Enclaves: Enabling Secure Collaboration over the Internet

The rapid expansion of the Internet means that users increasingly want to interact with each other. Due to the openness and unsecure nature of the net, users often have to rely on firewalls to protect their connections. Firewalls, however, make real-time interaction and collaboration more difficult. Firewalls are also complicated to configure and expensive to install and maintain, and are inaccessible to small home offices and mobile users. The Enclaves approach is to transform user machines into "enclaves," which are protected from outside interference and attacks. Using Enclaves, a group of collaborators can dynamically form a secure virtual subnet within which to conduct their joint business. This paper describes the design and implementation of the Enclaves toolkit, and some applications we have built using the toolkit. I. Motivation Most user interaction and collaboration over the Internet have been primarily via electronic mail. More recently, groupware applications including te..