Towards Practical IPSec over Challenged Networks

IPSec is a protocol commonly used in Internet, and in fact it has been the standard for secure communication in Internet-based communications. Therefore, it is very important to design and implement the IPSec protocol in network systems. However, in challenged networks, it is challenging to implement practical IPSec protocols. In this paper, we propose VCI, a framework to implement IPSec over Challenged networks. We discuss the two key techniques in VCI, namely channel virtualization and packet fragment/assembling. As an instance, we also provide the implementation details for VCI in lwIP, a lightweight TCP/IP suite commonly used in embedded systems.