SwiftParade: Anti-burst Multipath Validation

Path validation promises a necessary security add-on for future Internet architectures. It authenticates not only source identities but also the exact path where a packet forwards through. This offers users more flexibility and reliability in network services. Most existing solutions focus on single-path validation that pre-correlates a packet to a specific forwarding path. However, parallel transmissions in multipath routing tend to induce bursty traffic that is hardly validated in time by existing solutions. In this paper, we present SwiftParade as the first attempt toward anti-burst multipath validation. It proposes a composite validation technique that can simultaneously validate a group of packets likely from multiple different paths. This helps to amortize the validation overhead across packets of the entire group instead of imposing the validation overhead equally on every packet. To implement composite validation, SwiftParade further explores a noncommutative homomorphic asymmetric encryption scheme. We prove effectiveness and security of SwiftParade through theoretical analysis. We also conduct extensive experiments to evaluate SwiftParade performance. The results show that SwiftParade offers high efficiency and applicability to multipath validation with complex routing topologies. In comparison with the state-of-the-art multipath validation solution—Atlas, SwiftParade speeds up packet processing by 2.5×
$\sim 8.3\times$
and increases communication throughput by 2.8×
$\sim 10.2\times$
.