Distributed Authentication Mechanism for Mobile IP Route Optimization

Mobile IP protocol provides a scalable indirection mechanism allowing the mobile hosts to maintain network layer connectivity across mobility. This leads to `triangle´ or `indirect´ routing towards the mobile host. To ameliorate this routing inefficiency, route optimization has been proposed. One of the open issues in mobile IP Route optimization is the authentication of `binding update´ message at the correspondent node. This paper proposes a robust, scalable and efficient distributed authentication mechanism far the `binding update´ message in mobile IP route optimization. The mechanism does not require preconfiguration of a shared secret key between the home agent and the correspondent node and is still strong enough to achieve its goal. The proposed mechanism only affects the mobile IP routing protocol and the mobility aware correspondent nodes, and hence is easily incorporated in both MoIPv4 and MoIPv6