SafeZone: A Hierarchical Inter-Domain Authenticated Source Address Validation Solution

Abstract

Next generation Internet is highly concerned with the issue of trustworthy. An important foundation of trustworthy is authentication of the source IP address. With existing signature-and-verification based defense mechanisms, there is a lack of hierarchical architecture, which makes the structure of the trust alliance excessively flat and single. Moreover, with the increasing scale of trust alliances, costs of validation grow so quickly that they do not adapt to incremental deployment. Via comparison with traditional solutions, this article proposes a hierarchical, inter-domain authenticated source address validation solution named SafeZone. SafeZone employs two intelligent designs: lightweight tag replacement and a hierarchical partitioning scheme, each of which helps to ensure that SafeZone can construct trustworthy and hierarchical trust alliances without the negative influences and complex operations on de facto networks. Extensive experiments also indicate that SafeZone can effectively obtain the design goals of a hierarchical architecture, along with lightweight, loose coupling and multi-fence support as well as supporting incremental deployment.