Mobility support is an essential part of IPv6 because we have recently seen sharp increases in the number of mobile users. A security weakness in mobility support has a direct consequence on the security of users because it obscures the distinction between devices and users. Unfortunately, a malicious and unauthenticated message in mobility support may open a security hole for intruders by supplying an easy mean to launch an attack that hijacks an ongoing session to a location chosen by the intruder. In this paper, we show how to thwart such a session hijacking attack by authenticating a suspicious message. Although much research has been directed toward addressing similar problems, we contend that our proposed protocol would outperform other proposals that have been advanced. This claim is based on observations that the proposed protocol has strengths such as light computational load, backward compatibility, and dependable operation. The results of in-depth performance evaluation show that our protocol achieves strong security and at the same time requires minimal computational overhead.
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