A method, apparatus, system, and signal-bearing medium that in an embodiment pre-register buffers remotely and create tokens locally that represent the buffers prior to a data transfer operation that uses the tokens to access the buffers. In an embodiment, the buffers are pre-registered via a translation table, and the tokens are used as an offset into the translation table. In an embodiment, the pre-registration verifies that the buffer is within memory allocated to a logical partition, which protects against the risk of address corruption.