Implementation of Network Source Authentication and Path Validation Using Orthogonal Sequences

The ability of a network node to verify where traffic is coming from and what path that traffic traversed is important for developing secure network protocols and defense mechanisms against attacks. Cryptographic approaches to source authentication and path validation can have significant computational requirements and thus may not be well-suited for high-performance networks. In prior work, we have described Orthogonal Sequence Verification, which uses orthogonal capabilities based on inner product computations, which can be easily realized by basic bitwise operations in a processor. In this paper, we present the results from a prototype implementation of this technique, which shows that the proposed approach is feasible for implementation in practical networks.