What confidentiality and integrity properties are provided for SILK data sent across machines?
The rwsender and rwreceiver programs can use GnuTLS to provide a secure layer over a reliable transport layer. For this support to be available, SiLK’s configure script must have found v1.4.1 or later of the GnuTLS library. Using GnuTLS also requires creating certificates, which is described in an appendix of the Installation Handbook. We recommend creating a local certificate authority (CA) file, and creating program-specific certificates signed by that local CA. The local CA and program-specific certificates are copied onto the machines where rwsender and rwreceiver are running. The local CA acts as a shared secret: it is on both machines and it is used to verify the asymmetric keys between the rwsender and rwreceiver certificates. If someone else has access to the local CA, they would not be able to decipher the conversation, since the conversation is encrypted with a private key that was negotiated during the initialization of the TLS session. However, anyone with access to the CA
