4.1.22 What is a "Session"?

 

Jonathan Biggar

(July, 1998) : A session probably maps pretty much to the same thing as the duration of a security context. SecIOP, the corbasec standard security protocol can handle more than one context in parallel and sequentially on a single TCP connection.

Nick Battle

(July, 1998) : A good question. I think what you may have in mind is more properly called an "association". An association is a state that exists between peers who have authenticated (possibly mutually) and established random cryptographic keys for the protection of messages between them. An association has a lifetime, defined by policy.

The SECIOP protocol establishes an association between the peers and then protects messages between them. The SECIOP protocol is security mechanism independent, but carries more primitive messages for mechanisms such as Kerberos that "do the hard work".