An architectural framework for data link layer security with security inter-layering

Security issues in the data link layer have not received much attention while network security problems have been studied and addressed in the application, transport, and network layers. This paper proposes a new security inter-layering approach to secure the data link layer in Internet protocol (IP) over Ethernet networks. In the data link layer, the authors propose to utilize secure namespaces instead of media access control (MAC) addresses to identify network devices, which also provides the means to bind the data link layer and other layers securely. Moreover, the authors present the network structure to provide link-to-link security and the key establishment protocol to generate security parameters in the data link layer.