Design and Implementation of SCTP-aware DTLS

There is currently no widely accepted and deployed approach to provide security for the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). A promising new approach is to use the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocol, adding an encryption and authentication layer between transport and application protocol. The adaption for SCTP supports all features without compromising security or requiring major changes in already standardized protocols. Therefore, this solution has been introduced into the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standardization by the authors. This paper analyses existing solutions to outline the requirements and how SCTP-aware DTLS has to be designed in detail to meet them. Performance measurements show that an SCTP association secured by using the modified DTLS provides almost the performance of a TCP connection secured with TLS.