A Mutual Authentication Method For Local MAC Address Allocation

Virtualization and scale expansion in cloud data center result in sharp MAC address consumption, which also expose some weaknesses in MAC address. Therefore IEEE standards organization proposed the concept of Local MAC address. However, among the automatic local address allocation protocols, security issues are not considered. To prevent the security vulnerabilities, we propose a mutual authentication method for local MAC address allocation in this paper. With the help of a trust third-party, the local address provider and client authenticate each other and establish a secure channel. Through the security analysis, it can meet confidentiality, integrity and validity of the message. In addition, we simulate the authentication process on the centralized address allocation protocol using OPENT and OpenSSL. The result shows that our scheme is feasible in different scales of network.