TrueID: A practical solution to enhance Internet accountability by assigning packets with creditable user identity code

Despite the Internet has been rapidly developed in the past three decades, its intrinsic security mechanism, e.g., IP source address validation and user identification authentication, is still not well addressed. This results in numerous cyber security threats. In order to enhance the Internet accountability and deter potential cyber-attacks, in this paper, we propose TrueID, an IPv6 header extension scheme which can embed hash-based, creditable and undeniable user identity code inside IPv6 packets. We present the system architecture, header’s format and viable implementation approaches with different credibility granularities. Meanwhile, to verify packet credibility and integrity, we design an Autonomous System (AS) level public-key distribution systemwhich can disseminate user’s public keys between allied ASes safely. Also, the prototype experiment has proved that our scheme possesses these features with desirable performance. © 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.