Design and implementation of improved security protocols for DHCP using digital certificates

DHCP protocol is used to allocate network configuration parameters to each computer in the network. However, there are a number of security issues related to DHCP operation, especially MAC address spoofing. Moreover, existing research still cannot provide sufficient security level. In this paper, we introduce two security enhancement techniques of DHCP protocol for DHCP clients based on digital certificates. Moreover, the proposed technique works well with DHCP clients without digital certificates. The security analysis is provided to guarantee security of the proposed protocols. Furthermore, we implement a prototype of the proposed protocols to show that the proposed protocols are practical.