SEMOS: A Middleware for Providing Secure and Mobility-Aware Sessions over a P2P Overlay Network

Abstract

Mobility and security are major features for both current and future network infrastructures. Nevertheless, the integration of mobility in traditional virtual private networks is difficult due to the costs of re-establishing broken secure tunnels and restarting broken connections. Besides session recovery costs, renegotiation steps also present inherent vulnerabilities. In order to address these issues, we propose a new distributed mobile VPN system called SEcured MObile Session (SEMOS). Based upon our CLOAK peer-to-peer overlay architecture, SEMOS provides security services to the application layer connections of mobile users. Secure and resilient sessions allow user connections to survive network failures as opposed to regular transport layer secured connections used by traditional VPN protocols.