Secure Mobile IP Communication: Marc Danzeisen and Prof. Dr. Torsten Braun

Secure Mobile IP Communication
Marc Danzeisen
and
Prof. Dr. Torsten Braun
Institute of Computer Science and Applied
Mathematics, University of Bern
Presented By,
Vinod Mehta
Introduction
• Describes a solution called Secure Mobile IP (SecMIP)
to provide mobile IP users secure access to their
company's firewall protected virtual private network.
• The solution requires neither introducing new protocols
nor to insert or modify network components. It only
requires a slight adaptation of the end system
communication software.
• The paper describes the concept, prototype
implementation, and initial performance measurement
results.
Overview of Mobile IP
• Mobile Node (MN): A host or router, which can change its point of
attachment from one network or sub network to another. This
change of location may not concern its (home) IP address. All
ongoing communications can be maintained without any interrupt.
• Home Agent (HA): A router on the mobile node’s home network that
redirects any IP packets for the mobile node to its current location.
• Foreign Agent (FA): A router on a visited network providing routing
services to the MN.
• Correspondent Node (CN): A host or a router with which MN wants
to communicate.
Mobile IP Functionalities
• Agent Discovery
• Registration
• Tunneling
Agent Discovery and Registration
FA Decapsulation
MN Decapsulation
Triangle Routing
Ingress Filtering could be a problem.

Reverse Tunneling
Optimization can be achieved by directly FA routing the packets

between MN and CN by building a tunnel with CN.
Optimized Routing
• Security will be a problem

• Have to inform all the CN of the MN’s COA– Not very feasible
Security issues in Mobile IP
• Eavesdropping: Where the attacker is simply “listening” at the

communication with some IP packet sniffer software.
• Replay Attack: An attacker records and replays the registration
sequence later.
• Denial of Service: An attacker overflows access server. This is
possible because the sensitive IP addresses of the HA and the MN are not
hidden in the registration messages.
• Tunnel Spoofing: The tunnel to the home network may be used to
hide malicious IP packets and get them pass the firewall.
• Session Stealing: Attacker hi-jacks session just after registration.
Security Models
• Weak Security Approach
HA has confidence that the care-of address of a MN is correct, because all allowed care-of
addresses concern to well known IP address ranges in the campus network.
Foreign Mobile IP compatible nodes (guests) in the network need to authenticate bindings.
When a MN is migrating outside the protected campus network, it sends a registration request
with password to the HA.
• Strong Security Approach

Mobile IP authenticates any binding notification messages or other information received about
a mobile host.
Public and private keys and trusted servers are used, but in turn it slows down the operation
All these open issues make it hard to
deploy Mobile IP in a company’s network
environment that is used to transfer
sensitive data.
What is the solution to this?

IPSec can solve nearly all of these
security problems.
The Solution: IPSec
• What is IPsec?
• How does it work?
• What issues does it handle?

What is IPSec?
• It’s a method developed by IETF to secure IP layer.
• This protocol suite adds security services to the IP

layer keeping compatible with IP standard.
• IPSec eases building secure virtual private networks

(VPN) – a secure, private network that is as safe or
safer than an isolated office LAN, but built on an
unsecured, public network.
How it works? The Protocol
The IPSec-Protocol-Suite consists of three main parts:
• Authentication Header (AH) - ties data in each packet to a verifiable

signature that allows to verify both the identity of the person sending
data and that data has not been modified.
• Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) – encrypts data (and even

certain sensitive IP addresses) in each packet – so a sniffer
somewhere on the network doesn’t get anything usable.
• Internet Key Exchange (IKE) – a powerful, flexible negotiation

protocol that allows users to agree on authentication methods,
encryption methods, the keys to use, how long to use the keys
before changing them, and that allows smart, secure key exchange.
IPSec Modes
• Transport
• Tunnel
Encapsulating Security Payload
Components
• Security Association
Based on the rules of that SA, decide how to decrypt and
authenticate the received data.
• SPI- Security Parameter Index

• Sequence Number
Authentication Header
• As its name says, it offers just authentication of data and
not confidentiality.
• IPSec uses symmetric encryption scheme to encrypt the
transported data.
• So now the only problem is to ensure a confidential
exchange of this shared key among the communicating
parties.
Internet Key Exchange
• IPSec group’s answer to protocol negotiation and key
exchange through the Internet.
• Works in two phases :
– Phase 1 has 2 modes
• Main mode
• Aggressive mode
– Phase 2 has just 1 mode
• Quick Mode-accomplishes by negotiating an SA for general purpose
communications.
Diffie- Hellman Scheme
• The keys are exchanged by Diffie Hellman scheme.
• Consider 2 parties A and B. Both select a large prime number P and a
primitive g. These are not secret.
• A selects a large prime number x (x<P) and transmits to B
X=g x mod P
• B selects a large prime number y (y<P) and transmits to A
Y=g y mod P
• A calculates the remainder s =Y x mod P
• B calculates the remainder s’ =X y mod P
• Now s = s’ =g xy mod P
• No one else can come up with this value with just knowing X,Y,P,g
• They need to know either x or y since the value s or s’ depends on the
private key which is secret.
Secure Mobile IP Scenario
• Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)
• MVPN
IPSec in Mobile IP
• As the mobile nodes that belong to the corporation have to traverse the firewall to
access the VPN, they have to authenticate themselves to the firewall. This
authentication is realized with IPSec.
• SecMIP uses an IPSec tunnel to protect the Mobile IP tunnel passing the insecure
parts of the Internet. Within the private network, however, the Mobile IP tunnel is
sufficient.
Sec Mobile IP Operation
1. Network Detection
2. Acquiring a routable IP address
3. Establishment of a bi-directional IPSec tunnel between
MN and Home Firewall
4. Home Agent and MN negotiation: Mobile IP
registration (light)
5. Data transfer from the MN to the whole Internet
including its home network
Network Detection
Acquiring a routable IP address
Bi-directional IPSec tunnel
Registration and Data Transfer
Registration: Since Everything pass through IPSec tunnel, no need for
authenticating or encrypting registration messages.
Data Transfer: MN and CN begin communcation.
If mobile node changes its location, the whole process begins with step 1.
Messages Exchanged
Security Aspects using SecMIP
• Denial of Service
• Replay Attack
• Eavesdropping
• Session-stealing Attacks
Experimental Results
Test Scenarios
• Routing Through the network
• Using Mobile IP tunneling
• Using SecMIP
Tested with Packets of sizes 64bytes and
1400bytes
Network Performance
Mobile IP
SecMIP
Conclusion
• All these tests have been made to see which processes
have which impact on the performance. Having a closer
look at the results leads to the conclusion that security
has its price. The deployment of IPSec realized as a
software module has to be paid with up to 80% of
performance impact.
• Looking at the available bandwidth of today’s mobile

networks as Wireless LAN, GPRS or even Bluetooth, the
estimated performance of SecMIP is acceptable for the
moment. Of course optimizations have to be considered
to keep up with new technologies.

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Secure Mobile IP Communication

Ingress Filtering could be a problem.

Optimization can be achieved by directly FA routing the packets

• Security will be a problem

• Eavesdropping: Where the attacker is simply “listening” at the

• Strong Security Approach

What is the solution to this?

• How does it work?

• What issues does it handle?

• This protocol suite adds security services to the IP

• IPSec eases building secure virtual private networks

• Authentication Header (AH) - ties data in each packet to a verifiable

• Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) – encrypts data (and even

• Internet Key Exchange (IKE) – a powerful, flexible negotiation

• SPI- Security Parameter Index

Data Transfer: MN and CN begin communcation.

• Looking at the available bandwidth of today’s mobile

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