Abstract

In this study we propose a multi-level security mechanism to provide secure data transmission in Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). During the time of TCP/IP protocols the computers were single-homed and nowadays there is a need for mobility, therefore new protocols were designed to support the mobility and multi-homing facilities. SCTP is a newly designed protocol that supports more interesting features such as Multi-homing and Multi-streaming when compared to the existing protocols. Since SCTP is designed for telecommunication its native design does not consider the security issues for data transmission. In this study we analyzed and identified the possibility places for hiding and exchanging of secret information in SCTP and proposed a dynamic encryption algorithm to provide a secure end-to-end data transmission between two nodes by altering the basic structure of the existing SCTP multi-homed protocol so that the attacker does not know the algorithm used since the algorithm is dynamic and the key for the encryption algorithm is hidden in the heartbeat signal of the SCTP and also suggest a method to detect the hacker incase of any attacks against the transmitted packets and finds an alternate path to transmit the remaining packets using the multi-homing options of SCTP.

Keywords:

Datagram congestion control protocol, dynamic encryption, hacker, heartbeat chunk, multi-homing, multi-streaming,

References

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Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.