Enhanced Security of Home Registration in the Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 Protocol for IoT Applications

Abstract

Today, Internet of Things (IoT) is enabling a new generation of dynamic ecosystems in environments such as smart cities and hospitals. Dynamic ecosystems require mobility management to track the current locations of mobile nodes (MNs) around the network without service interruption. To do so, the Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) protocol has been chosen, which minimizes the required signalling by introducing a new entity called the mobile anchor point (MAP) to act as a local home agent for all visiting MNs in a specific domain. In the HMIPv6 protocol, MNs typically use the home registration process to inform the home agent about the MN’s current location while it is away from its home link and hands it off to the MAP domain. The HMIPv6 protocol protects home registration against outside attacks. However, it fails to prevent the MN from lying about its current location, which can redirect data to the address of a victim. This paper addresses this limitation by proposing the Enhanced Home Agent Registration protocol. This protocol can support the location authentication of MNs to their home agents in the HMIPv6 protocol. This protocol combines two ideas. Firstly, it extends the functions of the MAP to register the regional care-of address of the MN at the home agent on behalf of all MNs. Secondly, it applies a reachability test for a synchronised regional care-of address. To investigate the efficiency, efficacy, and performance of the home agent registration protocol in terms of the home agent registration delay and signalling overhead, simulation is used based on OPNET™ Modeler 14.5.