Design and implementation of a secure Mobile IP protocol

As the availability of mobile communication facilities becomes more and more important for the modern information era, there is a growing appreciation of the need to establish mobility standards on strong security foundations. One particular aspect of security that has a great impact in a mobile scenario is authentication. Authentication, by definition, is the guarantee that a received message has indeed originated from the claimed sender. The importance of authentication is highlighted by the growing number of denial of service (DoS) attacks in recent years. The major source of DoS attacks in Mobile IP networks is the absence or weakness of authentication procedures between the various communicating entities. The paper analyzes the security aspects of the basic Mobile IP for IPv4 with reference to DoS attacks. It then presents a new authentication scheme that the authors have developed as a part of a Mobile IP. The scheme is based on public key cryptography and is scalable enough to be adopted on a network of arbitrary size. Protocol implementation is demonstrated by the development of a patch for the Linux kernel.