Light Weight Security for Parallel Access to Multiple Mirror Sites

This work proposes a new security paradigm for protecting the {em services} offered at network sites. Examples of the services are providing an online multimedia book or an interactive video application. In order to reduce the access delay to servers, the same file can be offered by multiple mirror sites. Furthermore, the file can be requested from multiple sites in parallel. However, to limit the bandwidth waste only a portion of the file from each server can be requested. Current solutions to provide parallel access to multiple servers are based on breaking the file into "b" pieces using Forward Error Correction (FEC) codes or their variants. In such techniques any "k >= b" pieces are necessary and sufficient to construct the file. However, as the Internet provides a new commercial infrastructure, network services will have prices. Thus, charging users for the services require authentication and authorization of access requests. As a result, as the degree of parallelism increases, a tradeoff occurs between the security overhead and access delay. In this work, we propose new file dispersal and access control protocols to reduce the security overhead significantly.