Weak Context Establishment Procedure for Mobility and Multi-Homing Management

Trust establishment seems to be the most difficult problem in mobility and multi-homing management. Many protocol proposals assume the presence of some security infrastructure (e.g. a Public-Key Infrastructure). However, building such a global infrastructure has not taken place, maybe because it would be too expensive and difficult to deploy. In this paper, we introduce a security context establishment procedure that utilizes reverse hash chains, and does not require pre-existing security information. The procedure is known to be vulnerable to an active Man-in-the-Middle attack in the first message exchange, however, the procedure is efficient, and does not have inherent scalability problems.