DHCP server authentication using digital certificates

Abstract

In this paper we give an overview of the DHCP security issues and the related work done to secure the protocol. Then we propose a method based on the use of public key cryptography and digital certificates in order to authenticate the DHCP server and DHCP server responses, and to prevent in this way the rogue DHCP server attacks. We implemented and tested the proposed solution using different key and certificate types in order to find out the packet overhead and time consumed by the new added authentication option.