PLASMA. Platform for secure multimedia applications

PLASMA, a platform for secure multimedia applications, allows secure communications within public networks and is particularly suited for transmitting compound multimedia documents. Using PLASMA, it is possible to negotiate the cryptographics protocols to be applied before starting the communication proper. This allows communications between domains using different security policies which, in addition, can adapt to the media-spcificstructures of the data to be transmitted. This paper describes the software design of PLASMA which has already proven itself to be powerful and flexible during the ongoing implementation phase. The PLASMA system was created by the Fraunhofer Institut fuer Graphische Datenverarbeitung, Darmstadt in cooperation with and funded be De.Te.Berkom, Berlin.