The Secure Pipes and Filters Pattern

Abstract

Many applications process or transform a stream of data. Such applications are organized as a sequence of different stages, which may be independent enough to be simultaneously carried out. The original pipes and filters pattern and the parallel pipes and filters pattern describe those actions. We present here the secure pipes and filters pattern as a secure version of the original patterns, which contains a minimal set of security mechanisms to provide a set of basic security functions. The secure pipes and filters pattern includes ways to add security controls at each stage of processing, controlling that only predefined operations are applied to data streams, as well as securing data movement.