Secure SCTP - A Versatile Secure Transport Protocol

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a new general purpose transport protocol defined by the IETF. Originally intended for the transport of voice signaling data (SS7) over IP networks, SCTP together with newly defined extensions is increasingly considered for other application scenarios as well. These require strong security solutions to authenticate the communication partners and protect sensitive data with respect to integrity and confidentiality. Proposals have been issued on how to protect SCTP transport by using standard security protocols such as TLS and IPsec. However, these solutions introduce limitations or inefficiencies und thus may not be able to fully exploit the capabilities of SCTP. Therefore, we propose a security extension to SCTP named Secure SCTP (S-SCTP) to solve these issues in an efficient and user-friendly way.