Development of a Secured Robust Header Compression Scheme Using Cipher Based Message Authentication Code to Mitigate False Initialization/Refresh Attack

Abstract

This research presents a secured robust header compression using Cipher based message authentication code to mitigate false initialization/refresh attack (CMACROHC). Several research works were done to address false initialization refresh attack (FIA) mostly focusing on intrusion detection system and ROHC network performance while neglecting the data authentication and integrity aspect of the ROHC. A cipher base message authentication code (CMAC) was introduced and integrated into ROHC to improve data authentication and integrity. In this work The CMAC technique was used to calculate and generate an authentication tag of the uncompressed packet using a secret symmetric key at the compressor and transmit the packet along with the tag to the decompressor. The tag is recalculated by the decompressor and compared with the received tag from the compressor to verify if both tags match. As both tags match, it shows that the uncompressed packet is authentic, from a legitimate source (sender) and indicates that the data has not been compromised. The performance of The CMACROHC was compared with IDSROHC to determine how well each of the schemes can protect and secure the packet along the broadcast channel. The developed scheme was simulated in network simulator version 3 (NS3). Its performance was evaluated using throughput and packet delivery success.