Securing control signaling in Mobile IPV6 Route Optimization with Identity-Based Encryption

Control signaling messages in mobile IPv6 are mainly used to inform the home agent (HA) and the correspondent node (CN) about the mobile node´s (MN´s) new address when its network attachment point is changed. In order to prevent various attacks, such as man-in-the-middle and denial-of-service attacks, these messages must be protected. Protocols based on Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) for protecting control signaling messages for route optimization in mobile IPv6 are presented. An overview of IBE is given and the elements and operations needed to set up an IBE infrastructure are described. Current approaches for implementing IBE-authentication between a MN and a CN are presented. Environments where the MN and the CN use the same as well as environments where they use different Public Key Generators (PKG) are taken into account. Finally, the performance of some proposed signaling protocols is estimated.