Secure End-to-End Transport over SCTP

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol is a new transport protocol initially developed to transport signaling messages over IP networks. The new features of SCTP make it also a suitable candidate for applications which nowadays use the standard transport protocols TCP and UDP. Many of these applications have strict requirements with respect to end-to-end security. Providing end-to-end security by using IPsec or the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol in combination with SCTP is subject to functional and performance related limitations. These can be avoided by integrating security functions directly into SCTP (S-SCTP). Although S-SCTP in principle solves all limitations, some issues remain hindering broad deployment of this solution. Therefore, we propose an alternative solution which preserves the advantages of S-SCTP while avoiding major modifications to existing standards and operating systems.