S-ARP: a Secure Address Resolution Protocol

  • Authors:
  • D. Bruschi;A. Ornaghi;E. Rosti

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ACSAC '03 Proceedings of the 19th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
  • Year:
  • 2003

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Tapping into the communication between two hosts on aLAN has become quite simple thanks to tools that can bedownloaded from the Internet. Such tools use the AddressResolution Protocol (ARP) poisoning technique, which relies on hosts caching reply messages even though the corresponding requests were never sent. Since no message authentication is provided, any host of the LAN can forge amessage containing malicious information.This paper presents a secure version of ARP that provides protection against ARP poisoning. Each host has apublic/private key pair certified by a local trusted party onthe LAN, which acts as a Certification Authority. Messagesare digitally signed by the sender, thus preventing the injection of spurious and/or spoofed information. As a proofof concept, the proposed solution was implemented on aLinux box. Performance measurements show that PKI basedstrong authentication is feasible to secure even low levelprotocols, as long as the overhead for key validity verification is kept small.