The emergence of various technologies has since pushed researchers to develop new protocols that support high density data transmissions in Wide Area Networks. Many of these protocols are TCP protocol variants, which have demonstrated better performance in simulation and several limited network experiments but have limited practical applications because of implementation and installation difficulties. On the other hand, users who need to transfer bulk data (e.g., in grid/cloud computing)

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... turn to application level solutions where these variants do not fair well. Among protocols considered in the application level solutions are UDP-based protocols, such as UDT (UDP-based Data Transport Protocol) for cloud /grid computing. Despite the promising development of protocols like UDT, what remains to be a major challenge that current and future network designers face is to achieve survivability and security of data and networks. Our previous research surveyed various security methodologies which led to the development of a framework for UDT. In this paper we present lowerlevel security by introducing an Identity Packet (IP) and Authentication Option (AO) for UDT.