Senetas
Corporation Limited, Australia’s world-leading designer and
manufacturer of high speed network encryption, has released a new
multicast encryptor (Patent Pending) designed to secure converged
networks and protect the “triple play” of voice, video and data.
The Senetas encryptor accredited to Common
Criteria EAL4+ (and in the final stages of FIPS 140-2 Level 3
accreditation) secures data in motion from a host to all members of a
multicast group at rates from 10Mbps up to 10 Gigabits per second.
Senetas chief technologist, Julian Fay said it was
designed to provide the highest
level of information security to applications including video
conferencing, internet based TV, online gaming and distribution of
critical business applications.
Mr Fay said the new encryptor functionality could
also be deployed to protect military multicast traffic, as it used the
AES256-bit algorithm, approved by the U.S. Government National Security
Agency in 2003 to protect classified information up to the ‘top secret’
level.
The Senetas solution employs an innovative
approach to solve the problem of maintaining secrecy in large dynamic
groups that requires a group key management infrastructure.
“Senetas has developed an automatic group key
management solution which is extremely simple to deploy and allows each
encryptor to securely share individual encryption keys with all members
of the group”.
“The group key management scheme, which is patent pending,
is responsible for ensuring group keys are maintained across the visible
network and is designed to be secure, dynamic and robust. It is fault
tolerant, with an ability to survive network outages and self-healing as
it can adapt to topology changes automatically.
“For maximum resilience Senetas’ group key
management scheme does not rely on an external key server to distribute
group keys as this potentially introduces critical impediments to high
availability network communications – a single point of failure and a
single point of compromise,” Mr Fay explained.
