Protocol independent lightweight secure communication

Abstract

This paper introduces a new protocol independent security mechanism, called PILSC (Protocol Independent Lightweight Secure Communication). PILSC utilizes the security feature of IPv4, defined but not used yet, in order to have standardization in secure communication. We aim to increase the efficiency of the secure data transfer by means of examining the shortages of different security protocols. Although IPSec is the only protocol independent protocol, the redundant overhead and its hardly configurable structure encourages us to design a more fast and easy configurable mechanism, whose architecture is presented in detail in this paper. The implementation of PILSC on the kernel-level brings %75-%90 performance enhancement on cryptographic process time in comparison to the implementation of cryptographic processes in the user-space. Moreover, secure data transfer rate of PILSC is %20-25 faster than IPSec and SSL.