An authentication mechanism for USENET

M. Bishop

Like electronic mail, the USENET has no security whatsoever; forging
articles, or altering posted articles in transit, is trivial. The paper
discusses the design of an addition to network news based upon the
security enhancements being added to electronic mail. It uses the same
underlying key distribution and management infrastructure, so it does not
require new key management protocols or software, but merely the
integration of existing protocols. Further, it is completely compatible
with unauthenticated news, so it need not be adopted wholesale, but can
be employed on a site-by-site basis. The author also discusses expected
efficiency of the system. He also contrasts this scheme with some others
such as the existing nntp authentication scheme and with the use of
Kerberos. Advantages and disadvantages of the schema are described.