A secure and lightweight ad-hoc routing algorithm for personal networks

Over the past few years, there has been increasing interest in utilizing Personal Area Networks (PANs) to offer users innovative and personalized services. This interest is a consequence of the widespread use of mobile devices such as laptops, mobile phones, PDAs, digital cameras, wireless headsets, etc. to carry out a variety of user-centric tasks. The PAN itself is built upon an ad-hoc network where devices trust their neighbors to route their packets. The cooperative nature of ad-hoc networks allows malicious nodes to easily cripple the network by inserting false route information, replaying old messages, modifying messages of other nodes, etc. An applicable area still under research, and the focus of this paper, is secure routing protocols for ad-hoc networks. To achieve availability in the PAN, the routing protocol used must be robust against both dynamically changing topology and malicious attacks. However, the heterogeneous nature of Personal Network (PN) devices means that traditional security mechanisms are too resource intensive to be sufficient by themselves. This paper describes a new ad-hoc secure routing protocol for Personal Networks (PNs), suitable in a limited multi-hop scenario. This protocol is based on ADOV and relies on efficient cryptographic primitives to safeguard the security and privacy of PN users. Following that, a number of attacks in the area of ad-hoc networks are discussed, and it is shown that the new algorithm protects against multiple un-coordinated active attackers, in spite of compromised nodes in the network

How to Specify and How to Prove Correctness of Secure Routing Protocols for MANET

Secure routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks have been developed recently, yet, it has been unclear what are the properties they achieve, as a formal analysis of these protocols is mostly lacking. In this paper, we are concerned with this problem, how to specify and how to prove the correctness of a secure routing protocol. We provide a definition of what a protocol is expected to achieve independently of its functionality, as well as communication and adversary models. This way, we enable formal reasoning on the correctness of secure routing protocols. We demonstrate this by analyzing two protocols from the literature

Security in Ad-Hoc Routing Protocols

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) are becoming increasingly popular as more and more mobile devices find their way to the public, besides traditional" uses such as military battlefields and disaster situations they are being used more and more in every-day situations. With this increased usage comes the need for making the networks secure as well as efficient, something that is not easily done as many of the demands of network security conflicts with the demands on mobile networks due to the nature of the mobile devices (e.g. low power consumption, low processing load). The concept and structure of MANETs make them prone to be easily attacked using several techniques often used against wired networks as well as new methods particular to MANETs. Security issues arise in many different areas including physical security, key management, routing and intrusion detection, many of which are vital to a functional MANET. In this paper we focus on the security issues related to ad hoc routing protocols in particular. The routing in ad hoc networks remains a key issue since without properly functioning routing protocols, the network simply will not work the way it's intended to. Unfortunately, routing may also be one of the most difficult areas to protect against attacks because of the ad hoc nature of MANETs. We will present the main security risks involved in ad-hoc routing as well as the solutions to these problems that are available today.

Multilevel adaptive security system

Recent trends show increased demand for content-rich media such as images, videos and text in ad-hoc communication. Since such content often tends to be private, sensitive, or paid for, there exists a requirement for securing such information over resource constrained ad hoc networks. In this work, traditional data security mechanisms, existing ad hoc secure routing protocols and multilevel security are first reviewed. Then a new system, called the Multilevel Adaptive Security System, which incorporates the multilevel security concept at both the application layer and the network layer, is proposed to provide adaptive security services for data and routing processes. MLASS is composed of two subsystems: Content-Based Multi-level Data Security (CB-MLDS) for content-rich data protection and Multi-Level On-demand Secure Mobile Ad hoc Routing (MOSAR) for secure route selection. The structure of each sub-system is explained in detail; experiments for each sub-system were conducted and the performance was analyzed. It is shown that MLASS is a practical security solution that is flexible enough to adapt to a range of security requirements and applies appropriate level of security services to data and its distribution over ad hoc networks. MLASS provides a balance between security, performance and resource

Anonymous Secure Routing in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Although there are a large number of papers on secure routing in mobile ad-hoc networks, only a few consider the anonymity issue. In this paper, we define more strict requirements on the anonymity and security properties of the routing protocol, and notice that previous research works only provide Weak Location Privacy and Route Anonymity, and are vulnerable to specific attacks. Therefore, we propose the Anonymous Secure Routing (ASR) protocol that can provide additional properties on anonymity, i.e. Identity Anonymity and Strong Location Privacy, and at the same time ensure the security of discovered routes against various passive and active attacks. Detailed analysis shows that, ASR can achieve both anonymity and security properties, as defined in the requirements, of the routing protocol in mobile ad-hoc networks