Secure and Efficient Tunneling of MACsec for Modern Industrial Use Cases

TL;DR

This paper introduces a secure, efficient Layer 3 tunneling scheme for MACsec, enhancing industrial network security and performance by enabling bridging of local networks with two novel approaches.

Contribution

The authors propose and implement two new Layer 3 tunneling methods for MACsec, significantly improving security and efficiency over existing techniques.

Findings

Both approaches outperform state-of-the-art methods in security and performance.

The schemes enable bridging of local networks in industrial environments.

Implementation results show practical viability and efficiency.

Abstract

Trends like Industry 4.0 will pose new challenges for future industrial networks. Greater interconnectedness, higher data volumes as well as new requirements for speeds as well as security will make new approaches necessary. Performanceoptimized networking techniques will be demanded to implement new use cases, like network separation and isolation, in a secure fashion. A new and highly efficient protocol, that will be vital for that purpose, is MACsec. It is a Layer 2 encryption protocol that was previously extended specifically for industrial environments. Yet, it lacks the ability to bridge local networks. Therefore, in this work, we propose a secure and efficient Layer 3 tunneling scheme for MACsec. We design and implement two approaches, that are equally secure and considerably outperform comparable state-of-the-art techniques.