Network-Layer Accountability Protocols: A Survey

Abstract

Today’s Internet is vulnerable to numerous attacks, including source spoofing, distributed denial of service, prefix hijacking, and route forgery. Network-layer accountability is considered as an effective deterrence tool which can be used to address these attacks. Much research has been devoted to improving network-layer accountability of today’s Internet. In this paper, we first investigate the state-of-the-art network-layer accountability research and summarize a general definition of network-layer accountability. Next, we propose a network-layer accountability framework and present a taxonomy of network-layer accountability protocols according to accountability granularity. Furthermore, we compare these protocols and discuss their pros and cons mainly from accountability function, deployability, and security. Finally, some open research questions are emphasized for directing future designs.