An Analysis of Multipath TCP Security Vulnerabilities: A Research Study

Multipath TCP is a major extension of TCP that permits two endpoints to simultaneously use multiple paths between them for a single connection. This protocol offers promising techniques to maximize overall throughput, increases fault tolerance and redundancy as well as provides full backward compatibility with regular TCP. While the protocol specification is almost finalized, it is still susceptible to several security vulnerabilities, particularly during connection establishment. These attacks include Man-in-the-middle, ADD-Address, Denial of Service (DoS), SYN flooding, and other cyber-attacks. This paper attempts to propose an extensive analysis of Multipath TCP security vulnerabilities as well as existing solutions that have been devised to overcome such issues. Additionally, we've compared a list of recently introduced Multipath TCP security mechanisms to improve the protocol's performance.