Survey on Security Issues in Multipath TCP

Nowadays, many end devices have multiple network interfaces. Multipath transport protocols can utilize these interfaces to achieve more reliable communication and/or greater throughput. Data centers, mobile communications, and Internet of Things (IoT) can greatly benefit from such multipath features. Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) is a multipath extension of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), that is well documented and supported. For example, some Linux distributions natively include MPTCP. But, multipath support brings new security challenges compared to traditional single-path communication. For this reason, we present a survey on MPTCP from a cybersecurity point of view. We also propose a multi-dimensional classification of research publications on the MPTCP security topic for an optimal overview of state-of-the-art results.