SINE: Cache-friendly integrity for the web

Abstract

In this paper we present SINE, a cache-friendly protocol for integrity-enforced web documents. SINE operates by decoupling integrity from confidentiality and provides web documents with an integrity-enforcement authentication tag that can be incrementally verified by multiple parties. We developed a prototype implementation of SINE with minimal changes to the standard web client/server architecture and conducted experiments using the standard Squid web proxy. Our experimental results show that SINE provides the required integrity services to web pages while maintaining the standard caching mechanisms. Moreover, by taking advantage of caching, SINE shows a performance gain that reached a factor of 5 over SSL/TLS.