Authenticated routing of table driven protocol in an ad-hoc environment

Abstract

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are a new paradigm of wireless communication for mobile hosts. Recently, there has been an increased interest in infrastructureless secure mobile ad-hoc networks (SMANETs). One of the fundamental challenges facing the designers of the SMANETs, especially for military networks, is to provide central command and control over the network. The paper presents an optimal solution for such a network by securing an ad-hoc network running a table driven protocol. The system minimizes computation, power dissipation, and bandwidth by customizing the security algorithm for a specific application. We use a semi-centralized technique, instead of a decentralized one, which requires more computational costs along with high consumption of power and bandwidth. The optimized link state routing protocol (OLSR) is used as the protocol, but the solution can be easily tailored for other proactive protocols for ad-hoc networks. Our main focus is on authenticating each mobile node using computationally inexpensive hashing techniques and public key exchange mechanisms in an asymmetric key set-up. In order to protect the protocol from replay attacks, distributed timestamps have been utilized. The goal is a survivable system that works well even in the presence of malicious nodes.