Per-hop data encryption protocol for transmitting data securely over public networks

Abstract

It is a well-known fact that the Internet traffic travels through public networks. These networks lack security and are vulnerable. Encryption and public key cryptography are important technologies that are used to preserve data security and integrity, and to reduce information theft on the public networks. However, the existing routing protocols are incapable of providing secure data transmission on public networks. To this end, our laboratory introduced the Service-oriented Router (SoR) to maintain rich information for the next-generation networks by shifting the current Internet infrastructure to an information-based and an open-innovation platform. An SoR can analyze all packet stream transactions on its interfaces and store them in high throughput databases. Using the features of the SoR, in this paper, we propose a hop-by-hop routing protocol that provides per-hop data encryption. This infrastructure is proposing to preserve both the security and the privacy of data that traverses through public networks. We implemented a prototype of per-hop data encryption protocol on the ns-3 simulator and the results obtained are discussed in this paper.