Design and implementation of a cryptographic system embedded into linux kernel

ABSTRACTNowadays, thanks to Internet, information sharing is growing rapidly. The rapid growth oftechnology causes the increase of the importance of information. Due to the ease ofinformation sharing and rise of the information value many researches on securecommunication has been made recently.Many application-dependent solutions, which ensure only security of data that belong to itsapplication, were developed. In order to create alternative solutions to overcomedisadvantages of these applications, new application-independent protocols, which ensures theconfidentiality of TCP packets, have been developed. However, these protocols support onlyTCP protocol. In order to include support for other IP protocols, like UDP, ICMP, ...,researchers focused on protocol-independent architecture. Consequently, IPSec protocol wasdesigned, which is frequently used. However, this protocol has some disadvantages. Its hardlyconfigurable structure and its redundant overhead problem are some of them (Alshamsi veSaito, 2005).PILSC, implemented system, is using the security feature of IPv4, which is defined but notused, in order to have an standardization at secure communication. In this work thedisadvantages of well-known security mechanisms are examined and a new system, calledPILSC, is designed. One of the important reasons to design is the hardly configurablestructure and slow data transfer rate of IPSec. The main intention of this work is to increasethe data transfer rate by performing the cryptographic processes in the kernel. PILSC mainlyfocuses on confidentiality. It does not directly address the authenticity and integrity, althoughit can be extended this way very easily.PILSC architecture is implemented on Linux operating system. As a development methodLoadable Kernel Module is preferred due to its many advantages. While PILSC is running asa security module on Linux operating system, it manages the data transfer according to thedeclared rule database. The implementation of PILSC on the kernel-level brings %75-%90performance enhancement on cryptographic process time according to the implementation ofcryptographic processes on user-space. Moreover, secure data transfer rate of PILSC is %20-%25 better than IPSec and SSL.Keywords: Linux, protocol-independent, easily configurable structure, fast securecommunication