Local area network security: Authenticating the ARP protocol

With the emergence of Ethernet as the hardware platform of choice for implementing Local Area Networks, its security has become crucial to ensure data integrity, reliability and privacy. One of its internal protocols, ARP, is well known for being susceptible to an attack called ARP poisoning, which relies on the fact that ARP has no authentication mechanism. This thesis describes the ARP poisoning technique, some prevention measures, and proposes Autharp: an extension to ARP that adds cryptographical strength authentication.