A multi-layer IPsec protocol

  • Authors:
  • Yongguang Zhang;Bikramjit Singh

  • Affiliations:
  • HRL Laboratories, LLC;HRL Laboratories, LLC

  • Venue:
  • SSYM'00 Proceedings of the 9th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 9
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

IPsec [KA98c] is a suite of standard protocols that provides security services for Internet communications. It protects the entire IP datagram in an "end-to-end" fashion; no intermediate network node in the public Internet can access or modify any information above the IP layer in an IPsec-protected packet. However, recent advances in internet technology introduce a rich new set of services and applications, like traffic engineering, TCP performance enhancements, or transparent proxying and caching, all of which require intermediate network nodes to access a certain part of an IP datagram, usually the upper layer protocol information, to perform flow classification, constraint-based routing, or other customized processing. This is in direct conflict with the IPsec mechanisms. In this research, we propose a multi-layer security protection scheme for IPsec, which uses a finer-grain access control to allow trusted intermediate routers to read and write selected portions of IP datagrams (usually the headers) in a secure and controlled manner.