IKE context transfer in an IPv6 mobility environment

Internet Security is a major goal for both ISPs1 and their customers but security provisioning has a cost in terms of bandwidth consumption and cryptographic material computation. In a mobility context this security must be set up from scratch after each handover and for each customer. The context transfer mechanism provides an efficient way to re-establish security parameters. This mechanism aims to transfer suitable information between equipments in order to reduce handover time. The benefits for an operator would be to maintain the same security level during and after a handover while keeping costs as lower as possible. In this paper, we use context transfer in order to transfer the IPsec and IKE contexts related to a mobile node from a previous security gateway to a new one. The first purpose of this paper is to define the IKEv2 context and to provide a solution for handling SPIs2 collisions using MOBIKE. The second aim of this paper is to set out an implementation of the Context Transfer Protocol for IPsec/IKEv1 in an IPv6 mobility environment and to provide performance results of such an optimisation.