The Ericsson DSI team authored this technology brief explaining 'distributed security architecture' (DSI) that supports advanced security mechanisms. Targeted at telecom applications running on carrier-class Linux clusters, the DSI team offers a great overview in this online Linux Journal article . . .

“The telecommunication industry's interest in clustering originates from the fact that clusters address carrier-class characteristics such as guaranteed service availability, reliability and scaled performance, using cost-effective hardware and software. These carrier-class characteristics have evolved with time to include requirements for advanced levels of security. However, few efforts exist to build a coherent distributed framework to provide advanced security levels in clustered systems.”

“At Ericsson Research, our work targets soft real-time distributed applications running on large-scale carrier-class Linux clusters. These clusters must operate non-stop, regardless of hardware or software errors, and must allow operators to upgrade hardware and software during operation, without disturbing the application that run on them. In such clusters, software and hardware configurations are under the tight control of administrators. Communications between the nodes inside the cluster to computers external to the cluster are restricted.”

“In this article, we present the rationale behind developing a new architecture named the Distributed Security Infrastructure (DSI). We describe the main elements of this architecture and discuss our preliminary results . . . “

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