Secured VPN Models for LTE Backhaul Networks

Madhusanka Liyanage, Andrei Gurtov

Centre for Wireless Communications
University of Oulu, P.O. Box 4500, FI-90014 Oulu, Finland
Email: [madhusanka, gurtov]@ee.oulu.fi

AbstractThe Long Term Evolution (LTE) architecture proposes a flat all-IP backhaul network. 3rd Generation Partnership
Project (3GPP) specified new security and traffic transport
requirements of new LTE backhaul network. However, existing
LTE backhaul traffic architectures are incapable of achieving
these security requirements.
In this paper, we propose two secured Virtual Private Network
(VPN) architectures for LTE backhaul. Both architectures are
layer 3 Internet Protocol security (IPsec) VPNs which are built
using Internet Key exchange version 2 (IKEv2) and Host Identity
Protocol (HIP). They are capable of fulfilling 3GPP security
requirements such as user authentication, user authorization,
payload encryption, privacy protection and IP based attack
prevention. We study various IP based attacks on LTE backhaul
and our proposed architectures can protect the backhaul network
from them.

I. I NTRODUCTION
Affordable, truly accessible mobile broadband has matured with HSPA (High Speed Packet Access), HSPA+ and
LTE/LTE-A will be used in the near future. However, the
LTE architecture proposes a flat all-IP backhaul network.
Furthermore, new security and traffic transport requirements
of LTE backhaul are specified by 3GPP. The motivation of
this research is to identify these security challenges of the LTE
backhaul and to provide a secured backhaul traffic architecture.
Additionally, various types of traffic will be transported by
the LTE backhaul starting from evolved nodeBs (eNBs), such
as S1-U traffic to the Service Gateway (SGW), S1-C traffic
to the Mobility Management Entity (MME), X2-U and X2C traffic to other eNBs etc [1]. There are two crucial traffic
transport issues identified due to these different traffics. First
issue is to backhaul different traffics to the correct destination.
Second problem is to provide different levels of Quality of
Service (QoS), priority and fault management requirements
for different traffic types. A VPN based backhaul traffic
architecture is a promising solution to fix above issues.
Therefore, we propose two IPsec VPN architectures not only
to fulfill LTE backhaul security requirements but also to solve
the above traffic transport problems. This is the first secured
VPN architecture proposal for the LTE backhaul network.
Our first architecture is an IPsec tunnel mode VPN which
is built using IKEv2. Second architecture is an IPsec BEET
(Bound End-to-End Tunnel) mode VPN which is built using
HIP. Both architectures are able to secure the backhaul traffic
by fulfilling 3GPP security requirements for LTE backhaul
such as user authentication, authorization, payload encryption,
privacy protection and IP based attack prevention.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Related work

is mentioned in Section II. The background of LTE backhaul
network and used protocols are presented in Section III. The
proposed VPN architectures are described in Section IV. We
discuss our simulation model and the results in Section V.
Section VI and VII respectively contain the discussion and
conclusions of the research.
II. R ELATED WORK
All-IP LTE backhaul needs to satisfy several architectural
requirements such as traffic transportation, mobility management, security etc. A summary of these requirements can
be found in [1] [2]. Furthermore, the network operators will
be encountered a number of migration challenges when they
move from the existing 2G/3G backhaul to LTE backhaul and
these challenges are detailed in [3] [4] [5]. A thorough understanding of these requirements and issues ensures operators to
choose the right technology, network topology and architecture
to implement a successful LTE backhaul network [4].
The backhaul network security is one of the key challenges
of the future LTE architecture. Mutual authentication of eNBs
and IP attack prevention are required for steady operation of
the LTE backhaul. Further, 3GPP specification demands to
encrypt data and signaling traffic which are transported via an
untrusted network. However, LTE backhaul is lacking these
security requirements. Therefore, LTE backhaul traffic should
be secured by the upper layer techniques [1].
Multiple types of traffics will be transported in LTE backhaul. Thus, proper backhauling of the different traffics and
providing different levels of QoS, priority levels are challenging for network operators. Various layer 2 and layer 3 VPN
architectures can be used to overcome these issues [2] [1].
In [2], authors presented the advantages and disadvantages
of different layer 2 and layer 3 VPN architectures for LTE
backhaul.
VPN based backhaul traffic architecture is a promising exemplary to model the LTE backhaul traffic. It can be modeled
as a layer 2 VLAN or as a layer 3 VPN. However, moving
from a pure layer 2 topology to a full layer 3 VPN architecture
has more advantages such as less complexity, flexibility and
scalability [3].
However, above VPN proposals for LTE backhaul are not
accounting the security requirements of LTE backhaul. Hence,
a secured VPN architecture for the LTE backhaul is a novel
and well-timed research topic.

III. BACKGROUND
A. LTE Mobile Backhaul Network
LTE transport network contains three sections, namely radio
access, backhaul and core network. Among them, the backhaul
network can subdivided to access network and aggregation
network. Hence, the backhaul network extends from the first
transport equipment connecting cell sites (e.g. eNBs sites) to
the transport aggregation equipment connecting central sites
(e.g., SGWs/MME sites) [3]. In addition, several transport
interfaces (e.g. S1,X2) also belong to the backhaul network.
1) Security issues and protection requirements of LTE backhaul: LTE is about evolving to all-IP architecture. This evolution introduces several security ricks to the LTE backhaul.
Three main reasons have been identified for such security risks
[1] [2].
First, the LTE backhaul consists of the IP-based control
/service elements (MME, SGW,eNBs) and interfaces (X2,S1).
As a result, there is a possibility of several breaches and
IP based attacks to the backhaul. For instance, an IP based
attack which initiates in access network could affect the core
gateways directly. However, such risks were never seen in
previous non IP mobile backhauls.
Second, LTE backhaul network is now a carrier Ethernet
environment with hundreds or thousands of end users (eNBs).
Each node may have different level of security and these end
nodes provide plenty of potential entry points for intruders.
Thus, it is important to implement all network security features
by considering the LTE backhaul as a public network.
Third, LTE backhaul does not have built-in security in
bearer data as it is the case with 2G/3G networks. Prior to
the LTE evolution, traffics in backhaul network are secured
by radio network layer protocols. However, the air interface
encryption of user plane traffic will be terminated at the eNBs
in LTE architecture. LTE backhaul traffic can be eavesdropped
by unauthorized users. Hence, there is a requirement in the
3GPP standard [1] to encrypt both signaling and data traffic
in backhaul network.

Association (SA), BEET mode evades of transmitting them in

packet headers [7].
C. Host Identity Protocol (HIP)
Host Identity Protocol (HIP) is a new security and mobility
protocol standardized by IETF (Internet Engineering Task
Force) [8]. It separates the end-point identifier and the locater
roles of IP addresses. HIP introduces a new layer to the TCP/IP
model and it operates in between the transport layer and the
internetworking layer. HIP defines a new Host Identity (HI)
name space based on a public key security infrastructure and
it will be considered as end-point identifier. 128-bit hash of
HI is called as Host Identity Tag (HIT) and HIT is used by
the upper layer applications. Hence, typical IP addresses will
be used only for the locater role.
HIP nodes follow an initial procedure called Base Exchange
(BEX) before the data transfer. BEX is a four-way handshake
between users in order to exchange SAs and mutually authenticate each other [8]. This will establish an IPsec BEET mode
tunnel between users for communication.
IV. S ECURE BACKHAUL VPN

ARCHITECTURES

A. IPsec tunnel mode VPN architecture

Our first proposal is a layer 3 IPsec tunnel mode VPN
architecture. It uses IKEv2 protocol to exchange SAs which
are needed to build IPsec tunnels. The operation of our VPN
architecture is as follows.
A potential user must contact an existing VPN user to join
to a VPN. Our architecture uses an IP address based access
control mechanism. Hence, there is an Authorization Server
(AS) which is responsible for IP address based access control.
Existing VPN user needs to acquire the permission from this
AS to grant the access for the new user. Every VPN user
maintains a permanent IPsec tunnel to an AS for this purpose.
Furthermore, we are proposing a distributed AS system to
avoid a single point of failure and to provide a quick access
control service.

B. IP security (IPsec)
IPsec is a protocol suite for securing IP traffic of a network.
IPsec defines two new protocols; Authentication Header (AH)
and Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) [6]. AH protocol
ensures the authenticity of an IP packet. ESP protocol ensures
the authenticity and additionally encrypts the IP packet.
IPsec has three modes of operation. First, Transport mode
of operation, the original IP header is retained and the IPsec
header is inserted between the IP header and the header of
a higher layer transport protocol. Second, Tunnel mode of
operation, the entire IP packet is encapsulated in another IP
datagram and an IPsec header is inserted between the outer
and inner IP headers [6]. Third, Bound End-to-End Tunnel
(BEET) mode of operation, it is a combination of transport and
tunnel modes. IPsec tunnel mode uses two pair of addresses;
outer addresses for wire and inner addresses for application.
As inner addresses are fixed for the life time of a Security

Fig. 1: The protocol stack of IPSec/IKEv2 VPN

Figure 1 exhibits the protocol stack of our architecture. In
this case, there are two VPNs used; one for the traffic towards
the core networks and the other for X2 interface.
Further, it is important to distinguish the different traffic
types into different VPNs at end nodes (eNBs,MME etc).

Thus, we use a separate logical interface with a unique IP

for each VPN.
Generally, backhaul nodes are static. Therefore, our architecture keeps longer IPsec tunnels and schedules rekeying
event every 15 minutes to secure the connection. In a case
of IP addresses change of the backhaul nodes, operators have
to update the access control lists in AS. Then users rebuild
the IPsec tunnels using new IP addresses.
Furthermore, several modifications are proposed to the
IKEv2 and Figure 2 illustrates the modified message exchange.
Here, the initiator is the potential node to be joined and
responder is an existing node of the VPN.

Fig. 3: The protocol stack of HIP VPN

modified BEX.

Fig. 4: The modified HIP BEX

Fig. 2: The modified IKEv2 protocol
First five message exchanges are similar to the original
IKEv2 messages with DoS (Denial-of-Service) attack protection. However, the message I3 is modified and it contains the
potential VPN ID of the initiator. The identity of the initiator
is verified after the arrival of I3 packet. Then responder sends
an A1 packet to AS and it contains the IP address of initiator
and its potential VPN ID. AS checks the access control list
of the VPN and it will send an A2 packet to responder which
contains an acknowledgement. A positive acknowledgement
will grant the access and a negative acknowledgement will
discard the connection request.
B. IPsec BEET mode VPN architecture
Our second solution proposes a layer 3 VPN architecture
based on HIP protocol. HIP is used to create IPsec BEET
based VPNs overlaid on top of the backhaul network. The
basic model, backhaul element requirements and authorization
procedure are similar to previous architecture. However, there
are two main changes in this architecture. First, the access
control is checked by using HI of the users and second, IPsec
BEET tunnels (HIP tunnels) will be built using HI instead of
IP address based IPsec tunnels. Hence the underline protocol
stack is different and Figure 3 illustrates it.
We use a separate logical interface with a unique HI for each
VPN at the end nodes to distinguish the different VPN traffics.
We keep longer HIP tunnels and schedule rekeying event every
15 minutes. On the other hand, the IP address changes of the
backhaul nodes will not affect the existing VPN tunnels or
access control lists in AS, because they are built using HIs
instead of IP.
Furthermore, several modifications are proposed to the
existing HIP base exchange (BEX). Figure 4 illustrates the

First three message exchanges are similar to the original

HIP BEX proposed in [8]. However, message I2 contains the
potential VPN ID of the initiator. HIT based authorization is
sufficient enough to avoid spoofing attacks. Even if an attacker
is able to generate a valid HIT, it would fail to complete the
initial BEX due to lack of knowledge of the private key [9].
Addionally, a trusted third party certificates can be included in
I2 for further verification of the HI. Rest of the authorization
message exchange procedure with AS is similar to previous
architecture.
V. N UMERICAL

RESULTS

We implement our VPN architectures on MATLab and

conduct several extended simulations to study the performance under DoS(Denial-of-Service), DDoS(Distributed DoS)
and TCP reset attacks. We use a Transport Layer Security
(TLS)/Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN as our reference.
TLS/SSL VPN is a layer 4 secured VPN. However it does
not provide any layer 3 protection which is equivalent to the
existing LTE backhaul traffic architectures.
A. Impact of DoS Attack
TCP SYN (synchronization) packet flooding attack is used
as the DoS attack model. Our system model contains a single
VPN which has 60 nodes and a server. All nodes upload traffic
to the server and this server is under attack. It is equivalent
to the upload traffic scenario of S1-U interface where all the
eNBs uploading data to the S-GW which is under attack.
Attacker (TCP packet generator) sends TCP SYN packets to
the server by changing the port number and the source IP
address (One change per packet). Server allocates one port for
every successfully arrived SYN packet. As the TCP timeout
value is 270 s [10], an attacked port will not be released until
the TCP timeout expires. Likewise, attacker occupies all the

ports (64000 per user) [10] and IP address combinations. This

will terminate the communication in the network.
The LTE backhaul bandwidth is set to 500 Mbps and the
attacker has 100 Mbps connection. We run the simulation for
500 s and the attack is placed between 25 s - 125 s time
intervals.
Figure 5 illustrates the normalized average throughput of
a user over the simulation time. We can observe that both
500
450

TLS\SSL
BEET Mode
Tunnel Mode

400

Throughput(Mbps)

350
300
250
200
150
100
50
0

100

200

300

400

can observe that both IPsec tunnel and BEET VPNs have
no throughput drop even under DDoS attack of 20 attackers.
However, TLS/SSL VPN has no throughput (total packet drop)
during the DDoS attack also. When the numbers of attackers
increase, total system down time also increases and system
rapidly approaches to zero throughput status.
C. Impact of TCP reset attack
TCP reset attack is an IP based attack where an attacker
sends fake TCP packets to endpoints by setting the reset bit to
one. However, the attacker must include correct IP addresses,
port numbers and a valid sequence number in the packet
header. Once these fake TCP packets match with the above
parameters, end point resets the ongoing TCP connection [11].
We model a TCP packet generator which has the same
data rate as the VPN users. Attacker sends fake TCP packets
(with no payload) by increasing the sequence number until it
resets the attacked TCP connection. For each packet, sequence
number is increased by a window size which is 16384 (Typical
value for Cisco routers) [11].

500

Time(s)

TLS\SSL

0.9

Fig. 5: Impact of TCP SYN DoS attack

BEET Mode

IPsec tunnel and BEET mode VPNs have no significant

throughput drop during the attack period. They achieved the
maximum throughput similar to the non-attacking period.
However, TLS/SSL VPN has almost zero throughput (total
packet drop) during the DoS attack. As the TCP time out is
higher than the attack period, TLS/SSL VPN takes at least 270
s to fully recover from the attack.

Probability of a successful attck

0.8

Tunnel Mode

0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0

2500

5000

7500

10000

12500

15000

17500

20000

File Size (Kbyte)

B. Impact of DDoS Attack

Fig. 7: Impact of TCP reset attack

Same TCP SYN flood attack model is used to study the

DDoS attack scenario. We gradually increase the number of
attackers from 1 to 20. Figure 6 illustrates the normalized
average throughput of a user over the simulation time. As
we have similar results for IPsec Tunnel and IPsec BEET
VPN architectures for all tests, we present results related to
BEET VPN architecture of 20 attackers scenario only. We
500
450

TLS\SSL1 Attackers
TLS\SSL2 Attackers
TLS\SSL5 Attackers
TLS\SSL10 Attackers
TLS\SSL20 Attackers
BEET Mode

400

Throughput(Mbps)

350
300
250
200
150
100
50
0

100

200

300

400

500

Time(s)

Fig. 6: Impact of TCP SYN DDoS attack

The probability of attack (Figure 7) is calculated against the

file size. By considering the file sizes in the Internet, it is found
that the minimum file size is 4.5 KB and the maximum size is
20 MB.We see that both IPsec tunnel and BEET VPNs have no
effect from TCP reset attack and both architectures have zero
probability of attack. However, the probability of attack of the
TLS/SSL VPN increases with the file size, because larger file
sizes give more time (higher transmission time) for the attacker
to guess the correct parameters to reset the connection falsely.
In [11], authors mathematically analyze the TCP reset
attacks. The average time which requires to reset a TCP
connection can be calculated as
SequenceN umberRange P acketSize

(1)
T ime =
W indowSize
DataRate
We evaluated our architecture with these theoretical values
and Figure 8 shows that they have similar results. It verifies
the accuracy of our TCP reset attack simulation model. Here
we used sequence number range of 232 , window size of 16384
and attacker packets are TCP packets without any payload.
Attackers data rate gradually increased from 50 Mbps to 500
Mbps. When the attackers data rate increases, it lowers the

1800

Theoretical
Simulated

Time to a successful attack (ms)

1600
1400
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
0
50

100

150

200

250

300

350

400

450

500

Data Rate (Mbps)

Fig. 8: Analysis of the TCP reset attack model

time require to reset the connection as attacker can send more

packets in a given time period.
VI. D ISCUSSION
In this section, we discuss the security features of our
architectures and explain benefits over the existing traffics
architectures for the LTE backhaul.
1) User Authentication : New users have to verify their
identity by providing a trusted certificate or/and passing a
public key authentication during the initial message exchanges
(IKEv2 and HIP BEX). It provides the mutual authentication
between users and prevent outside breaches to the backhaul.
2) User Authorization : Authorization Server (AS) is the
key element for user authorization. Existing VPN users need
to get permission from the AS before granting access to a new
join request. Hence, malicious users (not in the access control
list) will not gain access to the VPN.
3) Payload Encryption : Both VPN architectures use IPsec
ESP mode. Hence, payload is always encrypted based on
SAs exchanges during the initial message exchanges (IKEv2
and HIP BEX). It will be secured the backhaul traffic by
unauthorized eavesdropped attacks.
4) Privacy Protection : In IPsec tunnel mode VPN architecture, the entire original IP packet is encapsulated and
new outer IP addresses are added to the header. Hence ESP
protection is afforded to the whole inner IP packet and privacy
will be protected. In BEET VPN, as long as HI is exposed
to the outside world, the original IP addresses are encrypted
during the communication. Thus, it will provide the privacy
protection.
5) IP based Attack Prevention : Our simulation results
(Section V) verified that proposed architectures are able to
provide a secured backhaul traffic communication during DoS,
DDoS and TCP reset attacks. Furthermore, user authentication
mechanism prevents IP spoofing attacks as well. Altogether,
our architectures provide IP based attack protection.
A. Comparison of IPsec Tunnel mode and IPsec BEET mode
VPNs
The IPsec BEET mode VPN architecture anticipates several
benefits than IPsec tunnel mode architecture. First, the access

control and policy management decisions are taken based on

HI instead of IP address. Hence, network operators can freely
reallocate the IP address of backhaul element without breaking
existing VPNs during new element deployments or a backhaul
routing optimization process. Second, single HI can represent
several physical/logical interfaces with different IP addresses.
Hence multihomed nodes can obtain advantages such as load
balancing and link fault protection by redundancy paths. Third,
a HIP enabled backhaul architecture can be used to provide
new services for mobile networks, for example layer 2 secured
automatic VPLS (Virtual Private LAN Service) for mobile
users [12].
However, BEET VPN architecture needs an initial capital
cost than IPsec tunnel mode, because BEET VPN architecture
required new HIP enabled backhaul network elements. Most
of the existing network element will support IPsec tunnel
mode VPN architecture, hence operators can deploy it with
a minimum initial cost.
VII. C ONCLUSION
We presented two new VPN architectures for LTE backhaul.
Both architectures are layer 3 IPsec VPNs based on IKEv2 and
HIP. The proposed solutions can secure the backhaul traffic
by means of user authentication, user authorization, payload
encryption, privacy protection and IP based attacks prevention.
Simulation results verified that they provide a secured backhaul traffic communication during DoS, DDoS and TCP reset
attacks. Future studies are focused on developing a mesh VPN
architecture for LTE backhaul and core networks.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work has been performed in the framework of the
CELTIC project CP7-011 MEVICO. The authors would like
to acknowledge the contributions of their colleagues.
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