Experimental Tests on SCTP over IPSec

As telecommunication technologies evolve, security in communications becomes a more and more relevant issue. IPSec is a set of protocols aiming to enhance security at the IP layer. Specifically, IPSec and IKE are important security mechanism that provide cryptographic-based protection for IP packets, and consequently for IP services. SCTP is a standardized transport protocol whose main features include multihoming and multistreaming, and is gaining momentum as a general-purpose transport protocol. While the simultaneous use of these two protocols is feasible, it is under study how to make them work efficiently. In this paper, we present a simple method to improve SCTP-IPSec-IKE compatibility by modifying the structure of the security associations. Despite the conceptual simplicity of our proposal, it has not been proposed before in related literature.