Semos a middleware for providing secure and mobility aware sessions over a p2p overlay network

International audience; Mobility and security are major features for both current and future network infrastructures. Nevertheless, the integration of mobility in traditional virtual private networks is difficult due to the costs of re-establishing broken secure tunnels and restarting broken connections. Besides session recovery costs, renegotiation steps also present inherent vulnerabilities. In order to address these issues, we propose a new distributed mobile VPN system called SEcured MObile Session (SEMOS). Based upon our CLOAK peer-to-peer overlay architecture, SEMOS provides security services to the application layer connections of mobile users. Secure and resilient sessions allow user connections to survive network failures as opposed to regular transport layer secured connections used by traditional VPN protocols. Document type: Part of book or chapter of boo

MobiVPN: Towards a Reliable and Efficient Mobile VPN

abstract: A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is the traditional approach for an end-to-end secure connection between two endpoints. Most existing VPN solutions are intended for wired networks with reliable connections. In a mobile environment, network connections are less reliable and devices experience intermittent network disconnections due to either switching from one network to another or experiencing a gap in coverage during roaming. These disruptive events affects traditional VPN performance, resulting in possible termination of applications, data loss, and reduced productivity. Mobile VPNs bridge the gap between what users and applications expect from a wired network and the realities of mobile computing. In this dissertation, MobiVPN, which was built by modifying the widely-used OpenVPN so that the requirements of a mobile VPN were met, was designed and developed. The aim in MobiVPN was for it to be a reliable and efficient VPN for mobile environments. In order to achieve these objectives, MobiVPN introduces the following features: 1) Fast and lightweight VPN session resumption, where MobiVPN is able decrease the time it takes to resume a VPN tunnel after a mobility event by an average of 97.19\% compared to that of OpenVPN. 2) Persistence of TCP sessions of the tunneled applications allowing them to survive VPN tunnel disruptions due to a gap in network coverage no matter how long the coverage gap is. MobiVPN also has mechanisms to suspend and resume TCP flows during and after a network disconnection with a packet buffering option to maintain the TCP sending rate. MobiVPN was able to provide fast resumption of TCP flows after reconnection with improved TCP performance when multiple disconnections occur with an average of 30.08\% increase in throughput in the experiments where buffering was used, and an average of 20.93\% of increased throughput for flows that were not buffered. 3) A fine-grained, flow-based adaptive compression which allows MobiVPN to treat each tunneled flow independently so that compression can be turned on for compressible flows, and turned off for incompressible ones. The experiments showed that the flow-based adaptive compression outperformed OpenVPN's compression options in terms of effective throughput, data reduction, and lesser compression operations.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

A framework for secure mobility in wireless overlay networks

Various wireless networks are widely deployed world wide. Current technologies employed in these networks vary widely in terms of bandwidths, latencies, frequencies, and media access methods. Most existing wireless network technologies can be divided into two categories: those that provide a low-bandwidth service over a wide geographic area, for example UMTS, and those that provide a high bandwidth service over a narrow geographic area, for example 802.11. Although it would be desirable to provide a high- bandwidth service over a wide coverage region to mobile users all the time, no single wireless network technology simultaneously satisfies these require- ments. Wireless Overlay Networks, a hierarchical structure of wireless personal area, local area, and wide area data networks, is considered as an efficient and scalable way to solve this problem. Due to the wide deployment of UMTS and 802.11 WLAN, this study attempts to combine them to implement the concept of Wireless Overlay Net- works. Furthermore, the information transmitted over this Wireless Overlay Networks is protected in terms of authentication, integrity and confidentiality. To achieve this goal, this study aims to combine GPRS, Mobile IP and IPSec to propose a framework for secure mobility in Wireless Overlay Networks. The framework is developed in three steps: Firstly, this study addresses the problem of combining GPRS and Mo- bile IP, so that GPRS users are provided with Mobile IP service. This results in presenting a uniform Mobile IP interface to peers regardless of whether mobile users use UMTS or 802.11 WLAN. Secondly, this study discovers the existing problem when combining Mobile IP and IPSec, and proposes a Dual Home Agent Architecture to achieve secure mobility. Finally, based on the output of the previous two steps, a complete framework is proposed, which achieves secure mobility in Wireless Overlay Networks, specifically, in UMTS and 802.11 WLAN. The framework also implements seamless handover when mobile users switch between UMTS and 802.11. This results in UMTS and 802.11 WLAN looking like a single network when participating in this framework, and presents seamless and secure mobility