A secure and easy remote access technology

Abstract

The authors proposed a new remote access technology, SoftWire, to provide a secure session between an intranet and a client for supporting ubiquitous office services, and secure sessions among several intranets for supporting dynamic collaboration services via the Internet. In one of the most convenient remote access system SSL-VPN, its gateway must be located in DMZ, installations and configurations are difficult for users without the administrator's help. In addition, SSL-VPN is unable to prevent clients from sending and receiving packets directly to and from others on the Internet, it has security risks of hacking and leaking of secret information. Remote access technologies are required to provide such functionality as easy installation, rapid reconfiguration, and robust security. To satisfy such requirements, SoftWire accommodates two new schemes: callback access and client firewalls. In callback access, a client e-mails an access request to a gateway that creates a new SSL session from itself to the client This allows gateways to be deployed at the user's desk behind firewalls and to be easily managed by users. Using client firewalls, a client dynamically controls a client firewall configuration to filter transmitted and received packets. This enables the client to prevent attacks from the Internet and block leaks of secret information to the Internet. We demonstrated that SoftWire can provide enough throughputs for practical applications