An incrementally deployable path address scheme

The research community has proposed numerous network security solutions, each dealing with a specific problem such as address spoofing, denial-of-service attacks, denial-of-quality attacks, reflection attacks, viruses, or worms. However, due to the lack of fundamental support from the Internet, individual solutions often share little common ground in their design, which causes a practical problem: deploying all these vastly different solutions will add exceedingly high complexity to the Internet routers. In this paper, we propose a simple generic extension to the Internet, providing a new type of information, called path addresses, that simplify the design of security systems for packet filtering, fair resource allocation, packet classification, IP traceback, filter push-back, etc. IP addresses are owned by end hosts; path addresses are owned by the network core, which is beyond the reach of the hosts. We describe how to enhance the Internet protocols for path addresses that meet the uniqueness requirement, completeness requirement, safety requirement, and incrementally deployable requirement. We evaluate the performance of our scheme both analytically and by simulations, which show that, at small overhead, the false positive ratio and the false negative ratio can both be made negligibly small.