Simple key exchange for active networks

Due to the dynamic nature and dynamic routing capability of active packets, security in active networks should be both end-to-end and hop-to-hop based. This paper summarises the identified drawbacks of existing approaches, and presents a novel key exchange approach known as simple key exchange for active networks (SKEAN). In SKEAN, an active packet is transmitted during (instead of after) SKEAN SA negotiation along a new execution path, with much reduced performance overhead for per-hop SA negotiation when comparing to IKEvI (when deployed in per-hop fashion). Experiment results of SKEAN and IKEvI are provided and compared.