Q-ESP: A QoS-Compliant Security Protocol to Enrich IPSec Framework

IPSec is a protocol that allows to make secure connections between branch offices and allows secure VPN accesses. However, the efforts to improve IPSec are still under way; one aspect of this improvement is to take quality of service (QoS) requirements into account. QoS is the ability of the network to provide a service at an assured service level while optimizing the global usage of network resources. The QoS level that a flow receives depends on a six-bit identifier in the IP header; the so-called differentiated services code point (DSCP). Basically, multi-field classifiers classify a packet by inspecting IP/TCP headers, to decide how the packet should be processed. The current IPSec standard does hardly offer any guidance to do this, because the existing IPSec ESP security protocol hides much of this information in its encrypted payloads, preventing network control devices such as routers and switches from utilizing this information in performing classification appropriately. To solve this problem, we propose a QoS-friendly encapsulated security payload (Q-ESP) as a new IPSec security protocol that provides both security and QoS supports. We also present our NetBSD kernel-based implementation as well as our evaluation results of Q-ESP.