MPLS security: an approach for unicast and multicast environments

Abstract

Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network architecture does not protect the confidentiality of data transmitted. This paper proposes a mechanism to enhance the security in MPLS networks by using multi-path routing combined with a modified (k, n) threshold secret sharing scheme. An Internet Protocol (IP) packet entering MPLS ingress router can be partitioned into n shadow (share) packets, which are then assigned to maximally node disjoint paths across the MPLS network. The egress router at the end will be able to reconstruct the original IP packet if it receives any k share packets. The attacker must therefore tap at least k paths to be able to reconstruct the original IP packet that is being transmitted, while receiving k − 1 or less of share packets makes it hard or even impossible to reconstruct the original IP packet. In this paper, we consider the multicast case in addition to the unicast. To our best knowledge, no work has been published for MPLS multicast security. We have implemented our model and measured its time complexity on variable packets size.