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A Secure DHCP Protocol to Mitigate LAN Attacks

Osama S. Younes

Network security has become more of a concern with the rapid growth and expansion of the Internet. While there are several ways to provide security in the application, transport, or network layers of a network; the data link layer (Layer 2) security has not yet been adequately addressed. Data link layer protocols used in local area networks (LANs) are not designed with security features. Dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) is one of the most used network protocols for host configuration that works in data link layer. DHCP is vulnerable to a number of attacks, such as the DHCP rouge server attack, DHCP starvation attack, and malicious DHCP client attack. This work introduces a new scheme called Secure DHCP (S-DHCP) to secure DHCP protocol. The proposed solution consists of two techniques. The first is the authentication and key management technique that is used for entities authentication and management of security key. It is based on using Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm supported by the difficulty of Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP) and a strong cryptographic one-way hash function. The second techniques is the message authentication technique, which uses the digital signature to authenticate the DHCP messages exchanged between the clients and server.