A comparison of three different end-to-end security solutions for the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) is presented in this paper. The compared solutions are SCTP over IPsec, TLS over SCTP, and secure socket SCTP (SS-SCTP). The two former are standardized solutions, whereas the latter is a newly proposed solution that was designed to offer as much security differentiation support as possible using standardized solutions and mechanisms. The comparison focuses on three main issues:

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... et protection, security differentiation, and message complexity. SS-SCTP compares favorably in terms of offered security differentiation and message overhead. Confidentiality protection of SCTP control information is, however, only offered by SCTP over IPsec.