SECURED AD HOC ROUTING PROTOCOL

Abstract

Ad hoc networks are a new wireless networking paradigm for mobile hosts. Unlike traditional mobile wireless networks, ad hoc networks do not rely on any fixed infrastructure. Instead, hosts rely on each other to keep the network connected. Although there is a trend to adopt ad hoc networks for commercial uses, the military tactical and other security-sensitive operations are still the main applications of ad hoc networks, due to their unique properties. One main challenge in design of these networks is their vulnerability to security attacks. Providing security support for large ad hoc wireless networks is challenging due to their unique characteristics, such as mobility, channel errors, dynamic node joins and leaves, and occasional node break-ins. In this work, these characteristics are exploited and presented a new design that supports ubiquitous security for mobile nodes, which scales to network size, and is robust against adversary break-ins to make any routing protocol on it secured. In this design, the functionality of conventional security servers, specifically the authentication services is distributed, so that each individual node can potentially provide other nodes certification services. Centralized management is minimized and the nodes in the network collaboratively self-secure themselves. A suit of fully distributed and localized protocols that facilitate practical deployment is proposed. The proposed protocols also feature communication efficiency to conserve the wireless channel bandwidth. It can be combined with any routing protocol to make it more secure. A novel aspect of the proposed mechanism is its independency from both the underlying transport layer protocols and the network layer routing protocols. At the end, a proposal, which describes a solution to the network-layer security in ad hoc networks in the context of AODV routing protocol is proposed. Further simulation and results show that the proposed solution exhibits less overhead compared to conventional mechanisms. iv