Secure Spread is a messaging toolkit that adds critical security to both external and internal networks. Secure Spread integrates the results of years of innovative academic research in the security of distributed systems, with a successful widely used messaging and group communication system. The toolkit provides a high performance multicast and group communication service that ensures the confidentiality and integrity of messages, and is resilient to faults across local area or wide area networks.

• Provides reliable, scalable and secure group communication based on The Spread Toolkit.
• A very powerful but simple API simplifies the construction of secure distributed architectures.
• Easy to use, deploy and maintain.
• Highly scalable from one local area network to complex wide area networks.
• Supports thousands of groups with different sets of members.
• Enables message reliability in the presence of machine failures and network partitions and merges.
• Services range from reliable message delivery to fully ordered messages with delivery guarantees (unicast and broadcast).
• Enables a decentralized architecture with no single point of failure.
• Enables systems to grow seamlessly without architectural changes

• Provides message confidentiality and integrity between daemons.
• Security provided without sacrificing high performance.
• Access control and authentication framework can be tailored for application requirements.
• Secure Spread uses the popular OpenSSL (www.openssl.org) cryptographic library to provide security services.

• Collaborative applications: chat servers, collaborative design, video-conferencing.
• Distributed transactions and database replication.
• Cluster message bus, management and monitoring.
• N-way fail-over tool for clusters and routers.
• Secure Spread was successfully deployed in experiments encompassing six sites across the USA (East Coast, West Coast and Hawaii), with hundreds of clients.

Secure Spread uses software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit (http://www.openssl.org/) and uses cryptographic software written by Eric Young (eay@cryptsoft.com).

Secure Spread was originally researched and developed at the Center for Networking and Distributed Systems at Johns Hopkins University, with the collaboration of the University of California, Irvine. Secure Spread research was funded by DARPA and by the National Security Agency. Secure Spread is not necessarily endorsed by DARPA or the NSA.