FATIMA: a firewall-aware transparent Internet mobility architecture

Ubiquitous communication will be one of the paradigms for the next decades. The use of the Internet in such applications demands for a highly reliable and secure system, especially when used in non-academical environments like remote offices, e-commerce, or traffic telematics. Today´s Internet, even with the mobility extension Mobile IP, has not been designed with private addresses, firewalls, network address translation quality of service etc. in mind. Several optimisations already exist-however security is often neglected. This paper proposes the firewall-aware transparent Internet mobility architecture FATIMA, which integrates security functionality but is transparent to existing Mobile IP implementations. All security critical functions are concentrated in a firewall, all control messages are authenticated, and micro-mobility is supported. Corporate networks with private addresses are supported seamlessly, and further extensions allow for the use of dynamic home addresses and quality of service support