Hardened networks: incremental upgrading of the Internet for attack resilience

Network security is conventionally implemented at the edge of the network (such as SSL, SSh), or router-based filtering. They require the awareness from the users and the understanding of the complicated configuration. They do little to provide resilience to network attacks. In this paper, we discuss a different approach to enhance of network security. We use smarter routers to build security mechanisms (source authentication, flow control, encryption) into the fabric of the network. It allows for incremental upgrading as well as compatibility with all current protocols. Since the security mechanisms are at the router level, there is no impact on the end user. We also show some implementation and simulation results.