Enhancing the Security of On-demand Routing in Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

We present the Ad-hoc On-demand Secure Routing (AOSR) protocol, which uses pairwise shared keys between pairs of mobile nodes and hash values keyed with them to verify the validity of the path discovered. The verification processes of route requests and route replies are independently executed while symmetrically implemented at the source and destination nodes, which makes AOSR easy to implement and computationally efficient, compared with prior approaches based on digital signing mechanisms. By binding the MAC address (physical address) with the ID of every node, we propose a reliable neighbor-node authentication scheme to defend against complex attacks, such as wormhole attacks. An interesting property of AOSR is the ”zero” communication overhead caused by the key establishment process, which is due to the exploitation of a Self-Certified Key (SCK) cryptosystem. Analysis and simulation results show that AOSR effectively detects or thwarts a wide range of attacks to ad hoc routing, and is able to maintain high packet-delivery ratios, even when a considerable percentage nodes are compromised.

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant CNS-0435522, by the UCOP CLC under grant SC-05-33 and by the Baskin Chair of Computer Engineering at University of California, Santa Cruz.