  Next generation Internet is highly concerned about the issue of reliability.
Principally, the foundation of reliability is authentication of the source IP
address. With the signature-and-verification based defense mechanisms available
today, unfortunately, there is a lack of hierarchical architecture, which makes
the structure of the trust alliance excessively flat and single. Moreover, with
the increasing scale of the trust alliance, costs of validation grow so quickly
that they do not adapt to incremental deployment. Via comparison with
traditional solutions, this article proposes a hierarchical, inter-domain
authenticated source address validation solution named SafeZone. SafeZone
employs two intelligent designs, lightweight tag replacement and a hierarchical
partitioning scheme, each of which helps to ensure that SafeZone can construct
trustworthy and hierarchical trust alliances without the negative influences
and complex operations on de facto networks. Extensive experiments also
indicate that SafeZone can effectively obtain the design goals of a
hierarchical architecture, along with lightweight, loose coupling and
"multi-fence support" and as well as an incremental deployment scheme.
