A scalable and secure VPLS architecture for provider provisioned networks

Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) is a Layer 2 Virtual Private Network (VPN) service. Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) defined the essential system requirements of a VPLS network. Among them, Security is a key requirement as a VPLS delivers the customer data frames via untrusted public networks. However, the existing secure VPLS architectures are suffering from scalability issues and they are infeasible to implement in large scale networks. In this paper, we propose a novel VPLS architecture based on Host Identity Protocol (HIP). It includes a new session key based security mechanism which provides the scalability both in forwarding and security planes. Initial simulations verify that the proposed architecture reduces the key storage in a VPLS node, the total key storage in the network and the number of encryption per broadcast frame than other secure VPLS architectures. Additionally, our proposal provides an efficient broadcast mechanism and comparably higher degree of security features than other existing VPLS proposals.