Minimal-Overhead IP Security using Identity Based Encryption

In this paper we propose a new network layer security protocol that allows encrypted and authenticated communication between hosts. The new protocol has a number of advantages over existing protocols, including: no initial handshake to establish a connection, zero packet overhead, no per-host state and simpler key distribution. The protocol achieves these goals by using identitybased encryption to generate a secret that is shared between two hosts. We have implemented the cryptographic algorithm and the protocol and integrated them into the Linux networking stack. We analyze the security of the protocol, show that with a small modification it has the minimal possible overhead and give experimental results on its performance.