A computer network is said to provide hop integrity iff when any router p in the network receives a message m supposedly from an adjacent router q, then p can check that m was indeed sent by q, was not modified after it was sent, and was not a replay of an old message sent from q to p. In this paper, we describe three protocols that can be added to the routers in a computer network so that the network can provide hop integrity. These three protocols are a secret exchange protocol, a weak integrity protocol, and a strong integrity protocol. All three protocols are stateless, require small overhead, and do not constrain the network protocol in the routers in any way.
Mohamed G. Gouda, E. N. Elnozahy, Chin-Tser Huang,