A security protocol for authentication of binding updates in Mobile IPv6.

Wireless communication technologies have come along way, improving with every generational leap. As communications evolve so do the system architectures, models and paradigms. Improvements have been seen in the jump from 2G to 3G networks in terms of security. Yet these issues persist and will continue to plague mobile communications into the leap towards 4G networks if not addressed. 4G will be based on the transmission of Internet packets only, using an architecture known as mobile IP. This will feature many advantages, however security is still a fundamental issue to be resolved. One particular security issue involves the route optimisation technique, which deals with binding updates. This allows the corresponding node to by-pass the home agent router to communicate directly with the mobile node. There are a variety of security vulnerabilities with binding updates, which include the interception of data packets, which would allow an attacker to eavesdrop on its contents, breaching the users confidentiality, or to modify transmitted packets for the attackers own malicious purposes. Other possible vulnerabilities with mobile IP include address spoofing, redirection and denial of service attacks. For many of these attacks, all the attacker needs to know is the IPv6 addresses of the mobile’s home agent and the corresponding node. There are a variety of security solutions to prevent these attacks from occurring. Two of the main solutions are cryptography and authentication. Cryptography allows the transmitted data to be scrambled in an undecipherable way resulting in any intercepted packets being illegible to the attacker. Only the party possessing the relevant key will be able to decrypt the message. Authentication is the process of verifying the identity of the user or device one is in communication with. Different authentication architectures exist however many of them rely on a central server to verify the users, resulting in a possible single point of attack. Decentralised authentication mechanisms would be more appropriate for the nature of mobile IP and several protocols are discussed. However they all posses’ flaws, whether they be overly resource intensive or give away vital address data, which can be used to mount an attack. As a result location privacy is investigated in a possible attempt at hiding this sensitive data. Finally, a security solution is proposed to address the security vulnerabilities found in binding updates and attempts to overcome the weaknesses of the examined security solutions. The security protocol proposed in this research involves three new security techniques. The first is a combined solution using Cryptographically Generated Addresses and Return Routability, which are already established solutions, and then introduces a new authentication procedure, to create the Distributed Authentication Protocol to aid with privacy, integrity and authentication. The second is an enhancement to Return Routability called Dual Identity Return Routability, which provides location verification authentication for multiple identities on the same device. The third security technique is called Mobile Home Agents, which provides device and user authentication while introducing location privacy and optimised communication routing. All three security techniques can be used together or individually and each needs to be passed before the binding update is accepted. Cryptographically Generated Addresses asserts the users ownership of the IPv6 address by generating the interface identifier by computing a cryptographic one-way hash function from the users’ public key and auxiliary parameters. The binding between the public key and the address can be verified by recomputing the hash value and by comparing the hash with the interface identifier. This method proves ownership of the address, however it does not prove the address is reachable. After establishing address ownership, Return Routability would then send two security tokens to the mobile node, one directly and one via the home agent. The mobile node would then combine them together to create an encryption key called the binding key allowing the binding update to be sent securely to the correspondent node. This technique provides a validation to the mobile nodes’ location and proves its ownership of the home agent. Return Routability provides a test to verify that the node is reachable. It does not verify that the IPv6 address is owned by the user. This method is combined with Cryptographically Generated Addresses to provide best of both worlds. The third aspect of the first security solution introduces a decentralised authentication mechanism. The correspondent requests the authentication data from both the mobile node and home agent. The mobile sends the data in plain text, which could be encrypted with the binding key and the home agent sends a hash of the data. The correspondent then converts the data so both are hashes and compares them. If they are the same, authentication is successful. This provides device and user authentication which when combined with Cryptographically Generated Addresses and Return Routability create a robust security solution called the Distributed Authentication Protocol. The second new technique was designed to provide an enhancement to a current security solution. Dual Identity Return Routability builds on the concept of Return Routability by providing two Mobile IPv6 addresses on a mobile device, giving the user two separate identities. After establishing address ownership with Cryptographically Generated Addresses, Dual Identity Return Routability would then send security data to both identities, each on a separate network and each having heir own home agents, and the mobile node would then combine them together to create the binding key allowing the binding update to be sent securely to the correspondent node. This technique provides protection against address spoofing as an attacker needs two separate ip addresses, which are linked together. Spoofing only a single address will not pass this security solution. One drawback of the security techniques described, however, is that none of them provide location privacy to hide the users IP address from attackers. An attacker cannot mount a direct attack if the user is invisible. The third new security solution designed is Mobile Home Agents. These are software agents, which provide location privacy to the mobile node by acting as a proxy between it and the network. The Mobile Home Agent resides on the point of attachment and migrates to a new point of attachment at the same time as the mobile node. This provides reduced latency communication and a secure environment for the mobile node. These solutions can be used separately or combined together to form a super security solution, which is demonstrated in this thesis and attempts to provide proof of address ownership, reachability, user and device authentication, location privacy and reduction in communication latency. All these security features are design to protect against one the most devastating attacks in Mobile IPv6, the false binding update, which can allow an attacker to impersonate and deny service to the mobile node by redirecting all data packets to itself. The solutions are all simulated with different scenarios and network configurations and with a variety of attacks, which attempt to send a false binding update to the correspondent node. The results were then collected and analysed to provide conclusive proof that the proposed solutions are effective and robust in protecting against the false binding updates creating a safe and secure network for all

Issues of Security in Routing Optimization at Mobile IPv6

Mobile Internet Protocol version 6 (MIPv6) adds the mobility function toIPv6. An IPv6 host that supports the Mobile IPv6 function can move around theIPv6 Internet. A connection between two nodes is maintained by the pairing of thesource address and the destination address. The IPv6 node address is assigned basedon the prefix of home network. The assigned address on a given network becomes invalid when the host leaves that network and attaches itself to another network.The reason for this problem came from the nature of IP addresses when a node visits a foreign network: it is still reachable through the indirect packet forwarding from its home network. This triangular routing feature supports node mobility but increases the communication latency between nodes.So it can be supposed to be overcome by using a Binding Update (BU)scheme, which let nodes to update IP addresses and communicate with each other through direct IP routing. To protect the security of Binding Update, a Return Routability (RR) procedure is developed which results vulnerable to many attacks.In Route Optimization, the mobile node sends the binding message to its peer node,the message contains the new address of the mobile node, called as Care ofAddress, which confirms that the mobile node is infect moved to the new location from its Home Network. After receiving the binding message, the peer node sendsall packets which are destined to the Mobile's Home Address to the Care ofAddress.There are many security risks involved, when a malicious node might be able tocreate a connection with the mobile node by sending the false binding messages.By doing so malicious node can divert the traffic, can launch the DOS Attacks andcan also resend the authenticated messages, etc. So considering these securityissues, we will discuss for a secure protocol which prevents the attacker to establish false connections and assures the secrecy and integrity of the mobile node and its peers

Securing home and correspondent registrations in mobile IPv6 networks

The Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) protocol enables mobile nodes (MNs) to remain connected to other correspondent nodes (CNs) while roaming the IPv6 Internet. Home and correspondent registrations are essential parts of the MIPv6 protocol, whereby MNs register their care-of addresses (CoAs) with their home agents (HAs) and with their CNs, respectively. Security provision for home and correspondent registrations is a fundamental part of the MIPv6 protocol and has been an open research issue since the early stages of the protocol.This thesis examines state-of-the-art protocols for securing home and correspondent registrations in MIPv6 networks. The strengths and weaknesses of these protocols are discussed. The investigation of these protocols leads to the proposal of an enhanced home registration protocol and a family of correspondent registration protocols. The Enhanced Home Registration (EHR) protocol extends the basic home registration protocol defined in MIPv6 to support the location authentication of MNs to their HAs. The EHR is based on novel ideas of segmenting the IPv6 address space, using a symmetric CGA-based technique for generating CoAs, and applying concurrent CoAs reachability tests. As a result, EHR is able to reduce the likelihood of a malicious MN being successful in luring an HA to flood a third party with useless packets using MIPv6. In addition, EHR enables HAs to help in correspondent registrations by confirming MNs' CoAs to CNs. Simulation studies of EHR have shown that it only introduces a marginal increase in the registration delay, but a significant increase in the signalling overhead as a cost of supporting the location authentication of MNs.The thesis also proposes a family of correspondent registration protocols. These protocols rely on the assistance of home networks to confirm the MNs' ownership of the claimed HoAs and CoAs. The protocols consist of three phases: a creation phase, an update phase and a deletion phase. Informal and formal protocol analyses have confirmed the protocols' correctness and satisfaction of the required security properties. The protocols have been simulated extensively and the results show that they produce lower registration delay and a reduction in the signalling overhead during update and deletion phases. This is at the cost of a varying increase, depending on the protocol variant, in the registration delay and signalling overhead during the creation phase.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceEgyptian GovernmentGBUnited Kingdo

Enhanced Home Registration security protocol in MobileIPv6

The Enhanced Home Registration (EHR) protocol extends the basic home registration protocol defined in MIPv6 to support the location authentication of MNs to their HAs. The EHR is based on novel ideas of segmenting the IPv6 address space, using a symmetric CGA-based technique for generating CoAs, and applying concurrent CoAs reachability tests. As a result, EHR is able to reduce the likelihood of a malicious MN being successful in luring an HA to flood a third party with useless packets using MIPv6. In addition, EHR enables HAs to help in correspondent registrations by confirming MNs' CoAs to CNs

Host mobility management with identifier-locator split protocols in hierarchical and flat networks

Includes abstractIncludes bibliographical references.As the Internet increasingly becomes more mobile focused and overloaded with mobile hosts, mobile users are bound to roam freely and attach to a variety of networks. These different networks converge over an IP-based core to enable ubiquitous network access, anytime and anywhere, to support the provision of services, that is, any service, to mobile users. Therefore, in this thesis, the researcher proposed network-based mobility solutions at different layers to securely support seamless handovers between heterogeneous networks in hierarchical and flat network architectures

Secure Mobile IP with HIP Style Handshaking and Readdressing

Mobile IP allows the mobile node roaming into a new IP network without losing its connection with its peer. Mobile IPv6 is using Mobile IP with Route Optimizationto improve performance by avoiding the triangle routing and adopting Return Routability as a secure process for binding update. Host Identity Protocol (HIP) is an experimental security protocol which provides mobility management and multi-homing by its new namespace. Its architecture is similar to that of Mobile IP with Route Optimization. In this paper, we have introduced a Secure Mobile IP with HIP Style Handshaking and Readdressing (SMIP), which has stronger security, better performance and lower binding cost in binding update process compared with Mobile IPv6. The dependence of home agent in the new scheme is also shown dramatically decreased. The initiated scheme integrated the primary features of two completely different mobility management solutions and has set up a migration path from mobile-IP based solution to a public-key based solution in mobile IP network

An integrated security Protocol communication scheme for Internet of Things using the Locator/ID Separation Protocol Network

Internet of Things communication is mainly based on a machine-to-machine pattern, where devices are globally addressed and identified. However, as the number of connected devices increase, the burdens on the network infrastructure increase as well. The major challenges are the size of the routing tables and the efficiency of the current routing protocols in the Internet backbone. To address these problems, an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group, along with the research group at Cisco, are still working on the Locator/ID Separation Protocol as a routing architecture that can provide new semantics for the IP addressing, to simplify routing operations and improve scalability in the future of the Internet such as the Internet of Things. Nonetheless, The Locator/ID Separation Protocol is still at an early stage of implementation and the security Protocol e.g. Internet Protocol Security (IPSec), in particular, is still in its infancy. Based on this, three scenarios were considered: Firstly, in the initial stage, each Locator/ID Separation Protocol-capable router needs to register with a Map-Server. This is known as the Registration Stage. Nevertheless, this stage is vulnerable to masquerading and content poisoning attacks. Secondly, the addresses resolving stage, in the Locator/ID Separation Protocol the Map Server (MS) accepts Map-Request from Ingress Tunnel Routers and Egress Tunnel Routers. These routers in trun look up the database and return the requested mapping to the endpoint user. However, this stage lacks data confidentiality and mutual authentication. Furthermore, the Locator/ID Separation Protocol limits the efficiency of the security protocol which works against redirecting the data or acting as fake routers. Thirdly, As a result of the vast increase in the different Internet of Things devices, the interconnected links between these devices increase vastly as well. Thus, the communication between the devices can be easily exposed to disclosures by attackers such as Man in the Middle Attacks (MitM) and Denial of Service Attack (DoS). This research provided a comprehensive study for Communication and Mobility in the Internet of Things as well as the taxonomy of different security protocols. It went on to investigate the security threats and vulnerabilities of Locator/ID Separation Protocol using X.805 framework standard. Then three Security protocols were provided to secure the exchanged transitions of communication in Locator/ID Separation Protocol. The first security protocol had been implemented to secure the Registration stage of Locator/ID separation using ID/Based cryptography method. The second security protocol was implemented to address the Resolving stage in the Locator/ID Separation Protocol between the Ingress Tunnel Router and Egress Tunnel Router using Challenge-Response authentication and Key Agreement technique. Where, the third security protocol had been proposed, analysed and evaluated for the Internet of Things communication devices. This protocol was based on the authentication and the group key agreement via using the El-Gamal concept. The developed protocols set an interface between each level of the phase to achieve security refinement architecture to Internet of Things based on Locator/ID Separation Protocol. These protocols were verified using Automated Validation Internet Security Protocol and Applications (AVISPA) which is a push button tool for the automated validation of security protocols and achieved results demonstrating that they do not have any security flaws. Finally, a performance analysis of security refinement protocol analysis and an evaluation were conducted using Contiki and Cooja simulation tool. The results of the performance analysis showed that the security refinement was highly scalable and the memory was quite efficient as it needed only 72 bytes of memory to store the keys in the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) device