Secure distributed intelligent networks

Intelligent Networks (IN) separate the control and call processing from the switches, leading to fast, vendor and network-independent services, with reduced deployment costs. The integration of new technologies such as CORBA and mobile agents improves the IN performance. However, the use of distributed technologies raises security concerns. In this paper, we present a secure IN architecture using application-level and CORBA-based security mechanisms. Furthermore, through simulations we measure the efficiency burden imposed by the employment of the security mechanisms in the case of Interactive Multimedia Retrieval. Simulation results demonstrate a scalability of performance decrease on the different elements of the network. However, the security architecture is flexible enough to achieve an acceptable trade-off between security and efficiency. Network and security policies can be configured to achieve tolerable levels of performance according to application needs.