A Secure Correspondent Router Protocol for NEMO Route Optimization

The Network Mobility (NEMO) protocol is needed to support the world-wide mobility of aircraft mobile networks across different access networks in the future IPv6 based aeronautical telecommunications network (ATN). NEMO suffers from the constraint that all traffic has to be routed via the home agent though. The already existing correspondent router (CR) protocol solves this triangular routing problem and permits to route packets on a direct path between the mobile network and the ground based correspondent nodes. We identify security deficiencies of this protocol that make it unsuitable for use within the ATN. We therefore propose a new route optimization procedure based on the CR protocol that provides a higher level of security. We evaluate our new protocol in three ways. We first conduct a simulation based handover performance study using an implementation of a realistic aeronautical access technology. We then investigate the mobility signaling overhead. Finally, we specify a threat model applicable for the aeronautical environment and use it to perform a security analysis of both the old and our new protocol. It is shown that our protocol is not only more secure but also provides better handover latency, smaller overhead in the aeronautical scenario and a higher level of resilience when compared to the original CR protocol.