The Problem of End-to-end Security for Proxy-based Systems

Proxies can provide valuable services for today's increasingly heterogeneous computing environment by providing various kinds of adaptations and enhancements. By breaking the end-to-end nature of the communication, proxies render the task of providing end-to-end security much harder or even impossible in some cases. We will discuss the problem of end-to-end security for different types of proxy scenarios, differentiating between network enhancement and content adaptation proxies. We will address the questions of when and how end-to-end security, like confidentiality and authenticity can be preserved, when having one or more proxies in the data path. For this, we focus on the following three types of security protocols: IPsec, TLS and Application Security