An application of the context transfer protocol: IPsec in a IPv6 mobility environment

rdquoThe use of the Internet must be able to be in confidence for users but security provisioning has a cost for ISPs'. In a mobility context this security must be set up from scratch after each handover and for each customer. Therefore, a mechanism has been designed in the standardization bodies: the Context Transfer. This mechanism aims to transfer suitable information between equipments in order to reduce handover time. The benefit for an operator would then be a same security level during and after handover in mobile networks but with a cost as lower as possible. The purpose of this paper is to set out an application of the Context Transfer Protocol to IPsec (Security Architecture for the Internet Protocol) in a IPv6 mobile environment. After a state of the art of context transfer for security, the paper quickly presents CXTP (Context Transfer Protocol ) defined at the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). Then, it defines the IPsec context and finally, it describes a CXTP based solution to transfer this context between two access routers in a IPv6 mobility environment.