SCTP with an improved cookie mechanism for mobile ad-hoc networks

The stream control transport protocol (SCTP) is a new transport layer protocol that has been designed to provide reliable transport over IP networks. While the transmission control protocol (TCP) is the most. popular transport protocol in IP networks, it falls short with regard to security - more specifically, resilience to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, such as SYN attacks. The need for resilience to DoS attacks is obvious, and SCTP provides for this resilience via its improved handshake mechanism and the cookie feature. The paper discusses SCTP simulation with particular emphasis on resilience to DoS attacks. As revealed by our detailed simulation study, the increased DoS resilience comes with increased overheads. While DoS resilience is extremely critical, reducing overheads in the resource-constrained wireless environment also assumes paramount importance. Hence, we propose an innovative cookie mechanism with a combination of cache and INIT packet repetition to minimize the communication overhead and simultaneously to maximize security associated with SCTP's DoS resilience over mobile ad-hoc networks.