An SDN-Enabled Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Towards Secure P2P Networking

The network connections based on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) are reliable but lack security protection. The conventional Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol adds an extra layer over the transport layer which enables payload encryption of the TCP segment. However, TLS relies on certificate authority (CA) to distribute the public key (for preventing Man-in-the-Middle attack), which involves nonnegligible overhead and constrains its use, e.g., TLS is not appropriate to peer-to-peer (P2P) networks due to the huge communication overhead. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel key distribution mechanism towards securing the TCP connection on P2P network. The mechanism applies an SDN-enabled approach to facilitate the Elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange. With this mechanism, the key exchange can prevent Man-in-the-Middle attack with minimal communication overhead. The experimental results built on the prototype show that this approach is efficient.