Enhancing security in mobile IPv6

Abstract

In the Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) protocol, a mobile node (MN) is a mobile device with a permanent home address (HoA) on its home link. The MN will acquire a care-of address (CoA) when it roams into a foreign link. It then sends a binding update (BU) message to the home agent (HA) and the correspondent node (CN) to inform them of its current CoA so that future data packets destined for its HoA will be forwarded to the CoA. The BU message, however, is vulnerable to different types of security attacks, such as the man-in-the-middle attack, the session hijacking attack, and the denial-of-service attack. The current security protocols in MIPv6 are not able to effectively protect the BU message against these attacks. The private-key-based BU (PKBU) protocol is proposed in this research to overcome the shortcomings of some existing MIPv6 protocols. PKBU incorporates a method to assert the address ownership of the MN, thus allowing the CN to validate that the MN is not a malicious node. The results obtained show that it addresses the security requirements while being able to check the address ownership of the MN. PKBU also incorporates a method to verify the reachability of the MN.