Routing Protocol Security OSPFv2 - Dissertation Example

Using MD5 method to make a comparison between the security measures often associated with the use of OSPF v2 Routing protocol, it worked quite well to implement a network structure, which made it possible to evaluate and assess the Project background research on OSPF v2 authentication security alongside highlighting the solution that was deemed reliable for the OSPF v2 authentication. Through the use of the Quagga software, a network was implemented, which helped in testing, as well as evaluating OSPF v2 authentication.

This project clearly demonstrated that OSPF as an interior gateway protocol, can route the Internet Protocol into a single routing domain. It showed that OSPF can gather a link-state information from routers and be able to construct a network of topology maps, which are more often than not used for determining routing table that is often presented in the internet layer. It was also shown that OSPF was designed in such a way that it can support the variable length subnet masking, and it is also capable of detecting any change within a topology such as any link failure and be able to converge onto a loop-free routing structure within seconds.

This project also demonstrated that the OSPF network might be subdivided into various routing areas for purposes of simplifying administration and optimization of traffic and for resource utilization. It also showed that OSPF does not make use of the TCP/IP transport protocol. It is instead encapsulated in the IP datagram. This contrasts with other related routing protocols such as the Border Gateway protocol and the Routing Information protocol. It also became apparent that Router within the same broadcast domain often link from adjacencies whenever they need to detect each other.

Such a detection takes place whenever a Router gets to identify itself within the hello OSPF protocol packet. This is often referred to as the two-way state. this project, as well indicted that the OSPF makes use of the multicast, as well as the unicast in sending the link state updates and the hello packets. Recommendations for Future Research The current research demonstrated clearly that it is possible OSPF V2 Routing protocol can be used as an internet security measure. Given the focus of this study and previous studies on OSPF V2 Routing protocol and other earlier versions, it is worth recommending that there is need to migrate to IPv6 considering that the solution to the existing problem which is OSPFv2 routing is to transfer to OSPFv3 and use IPsec Protocol between sites (WAN.

It has been indicated that OSPF protocol when operated on other versions such as on IPv4, it operates more securely between routers. This provides an option to use varied authentication methods to give allowance to routers that are trusted to participate in routing. Although it has been noted that OSPFv3, when running on IPv6, does not any more support the protocol-internal authentication, it relies on the IPv6 protocol security (Tanenbaum, 2003). As often is the case, the OSPF version 3 would help introduce some modifications to the given IPv4 protocol implementation.

Other than the virtual links, virtually all neighbor exchanges often exclusively make use of the IPv6 link-local addressing (Cisco Systems Inc, 2009). It is widely known that the IPv6 protocol always do run per link, and not based upon the subnet. It is worth contenting that all the IP prefix information has