Background:

I am trying to write a program in Elixir to test distributed algorithms by running them on a set of processes and recording certain statistics. To begin with I will be running these processes on the same machine, but the intention is eventually to have them running on separate machines/VMs.

Problem:

One of the requirements for algorithms I wish to implement is that messages include authentication. That is, whenever a process sends a message to another process, the receiver should be able to verify that this message did indeed come from the sender, and wasn't forged by another process. The following snippets should help to illustrate the idea:

# Sender
a = authenticate(self, receiver, msg)
send(receiver, {msg, self, a})

# Receiver
if verify(msg, sender, a) do
  deliver(msg)
end

Thoughts so far:

I have searched far and wide for any documentation of authenticated communication between Elixir processes, and haven't been able to find anything. Perhaps in some way this is already done for me behind the scenes, but so far I haven't been able to verify this. If it were the case, I wonder if it would still be correct when the processes aren't running on the same machine.
I have looked into the possibility of using SSL/TLS functions provided by Erlang , but with my limited knowledge in this area, I'm not sure how this would apply to my situation of running a set of processes as opposed to the more standard use in client-server systems and HTTPS. If I went down this route, I believe I would have to set up all the keys and signatures myself beforehand, which I believe could possible using the X509 Elixir package , though I'm not sure if this is appropriate and may be more work than is necessary.

In summary:

1. Is there a standard/pre-existing way to achieve authenticated communication between processes in Elixir?
2. If yes, will it be suitable for processes communicating between separate machines/VMs?
3. If no to either of the above, what is the simplest way I could achieve this myself?