On implementing security at the transport layer

We design a framework that implements security at the TCP layer to meet the necessity for a practical and truly end-to-end security solution. We call our framework TCPsec. TCPsec is a security extension to TCP and implemented in the kernel. Applications may use TCPsec through regular TCP sockets by setting special socket options. TCPsec uses a Secure Socket Layer (SSL)-like handshake to set up a secure session. It is interoperable with Network Address Translators. We implement TCPsec in the FreeBSD 4.7 kernel and evaluate its performance. Our implementation and evaluation show that TCPsec incurs only a modest overhead as compared to TCP and performs competitively with SSL. We also provide a formal verification of our protocol state machine.