Ad hoc networks rely on the cooperation of the nodes participating in the network to forward packets for each other. A node may decide not to cooperate to save its resources while still using the network to relay its traffic. If too many nodes exhibit this behavior, network performance degrades and cooperating nodes may find themselves unfairly loaded. Most previous efforts to counter this behavior have relied on further cooperation between nodes to exchange reputation information about other nodes. If a node observes another node not participating correctly, it reports this observation to other nodes who then take action to avoid being affected and potentially punish the bad node by refusing to forward its traffic. Unfortunately, such second-hand reputation information is subject to false accusations and requires maintaining trust relationships with other nodes. The objective of OCEAN is to avoid this trust-management machinery and see how far we can get simply by using direct first-hand observations of other nodes' behavior. We find that, in many scenarios, OCEAN can do as well as, or even better than, schemes requiring second-hand reputation exchanges. This encouraging result could possibly help obviate solutions requiring trust-management for some contexts.
@cite_7: 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. Military tactical and other security-sensitive operations are still the main applications of ad hoc networks, although there is a trend to adopt ad hoc networks for commercial uses due to their unique properties. One main challenge in the design of these networks is their vulnerability to security attacks. In this article, we study the threats on ad hoc network faces and the security goals to be achieved. We identify the new challenges and opportunities posed by this new networking environment and explore new approaches to secure its communication. In particular, we take advantage of the inherent redundancy in ad hoc networks-multiple routes between nodes-to defend routing against denial-of-service attacks. We also use replication and new cryptographic schemes, such as threshold cryptography, to build a highly secure and highly available key management service, which terms the core of our security framework.
@cite_1: Most recent ad hoc network research has focused on providing routing services without considering security. We detail security threats against ad hoc routing protocols, specifically examining AODV and DSR. In light of these threats, we identify three different environments with distinct security requirements. We propose a solution to one, the managed-open scenario where no network infrastructure is pre-deployed, but a small amount of prior security coordination is expected. Our protocol, authenticated routing for ad hoc networks (ARAN), is based on certificates and successfully defeats all identified attacks.
@cite_3: The emergence of the Mobile Ad Hoc Networking (MANET) technology advocates self-organized wireless interconnection of communication devices that would either extend or operate in concert with the wired networking infrastructure or, possibly, evolve to autonomous networks. In either case, the proliferation of MANET-based applications depends on a multitude of factors, with trustworthiness being one of the primary challenges to be met. Despite the existence of well-known security mechanisms, additional vulnerabilities and features pertinent to this new networking paradigm might render such traditional solutions inapplicable. In particular, the absence of a central authorization facility in an open and distributed communication environment is a major challenge, especially due to the need for cooperative network operation. In particular, in MANET, any node may compromise the routing protocol functionality by disrupting the route discovery process. In this paper, we present a route discovery protocol that mitigates the detrimental effects of such malicious behavior, as to provide correct connectivity information. Our protocol guarantees that fabricated, compromised, or replayed route replies would either be rejected or never reach back the querying node. Furthermore, the protocol responsiveness is safeguarded under different types of attacks that exploit the routing protocol itself. The sole requirement of the proposed scheme is the existence of a security association between the node initiating the query and the sought destination. Specifically, no assumption is made regarding the intermediate nodes, which may exhibit arbitrary and malicious behavior. The scheme is robust in the presence of a number of non-colluding nodes, and provides accurate routing information in a timely manner.
@cite_6: Providing security support for mobile ad-hoc networks is challenging for several reasons: (a) wireless networks are susceptible to attacks ranging from passive eavesdropping to active interfering, occasional break-ins by adversaries may be inevitable in a large time window; (b) mobile users demand "anywhere, anytime" services; (c) a scalable solution is needed for a large-scale mobile network. In this paper, we describe a solution that supports ubiquitous security services for mobile hosts, scales to network size, and is robust against break-ins. In our design, we distribute the certification authority functions through a threshold secret sharing mechanism, in which each entity holds a secret share and multiple entities in a local neighborhood jointly provide complete services. We employ localized certification schemes to enable ubiquitous services. We also update the secret shares to further enhance robustness against break-ins. Both simulations and implementation confirm the effectiveness of our design.
@cite_5: An ad hoc network is a group of wireless mobile computers (or nodes), in which individual nodes cooperate by forwarding packets for each other to allow nodes to communicate beyond direct wireless transmission range. Prior research in ad hoc networking has generally studied the routing problem in a non-adversarial setting, assuming a trusted environment. In this paper, we present attacks against routing in ad hoc networks, and we present the design and performance evaluation of a new secure on-demand ad hoc network routing protocol, called Ariadne. Ariadne prevents attackers or compromised nodes from tampering with uncompromised routes consisting of uncompromised nodes, and also prevents a large number of types of Denial-of-Service attacks. In addition, Ariadne is efficient, using only highly efficient symmetric cryptographic primitives.
@cite_15: So far, research on mobile ad hoc networks has been forcused primarily on routing issues. Security, on the other hand, has been given a lower priority. This paper provides an overview of security problems for mobile ad hoc networks, distinguishing the threats on basic mechanisms and on security mechanisms. It then describes our solution to protect the security mechanisms. The original features of this solution include that (i) it is fully decentralized and (ii) all nodes are assigned equivalent roles.
@cite_13: An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless computers (nodes), communicating among themselves over possibly multihop paths, without the help of any infrastructure such as base stations or access points. Although many previous ad hoc network routing protocols have been based in part on distance vector approaches, they have generally assumed a trusted environment. We design and evaluate the Secure Efficient Ad hoc Distance vector routing protocol (SEAD), a secure ad hoc network routing protocol based on the design of the Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector routing protocol (DSDV). In order to support use with nodes of limited CPU processing capability, and to guard against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks in which an attacker attempts to cause other nodes to consume excess network bandwidth or processing time, we use efficient one-way hash functions and do not use asymmetric cryptographic operations in the protocol. SEAD performs well over the range of scenarios we tested, and is robust against multiple uncoordinated attackers creating incorrect routing state in any other node, even in spite of any active attackers or compromised nodes in the network.
@cite_17: Hello, my name is Frank Stajano, I’m affiliated with AT&T Laboratories Cambridge, and I’m doing a Ph.D. at the Computer Lab. Today I am going to talk about the radio thermometer as an example of a wireless gadget that one might want to have talking with other wireless gadgets. I’m a bit of a gadget freak myself and I also have plenty of wire coming out of my pockets. It would be advantageous for some of these things to be able to talk to each other. You have a swarm of devices like this and you might imagine, for example, that I take a picture with this camera – this is not one of these models that have voice annotation but you may have seen there are some that do – and I say, “This was the security protocols workshop in Cambridge”. It is stupid for the camera to have to incorporate the microphone and digital audio hardware when this is already in my audio recorder (which has to have it because of its function), so it would be so much better if I could just speak into my audio recorder and have this be transferred into the photograph and not encumber the camera with other things.
The problem of securing the routing layer using cryptographically secure messages is addressed by @cite_13 @cite_5 , Papadimitratos and Haas @cite_3 , and @cite_1 . Schemes to handle authentication in ad hoc networks assuming trusted Certificate Authorities have been proposed by Zhou and Haas @cite_7 , and @cite_6 . @cite_15 employ a self-organized PGP-based scheme to authenticate nodes using chains of certificates and transitivity of trust. Stajano and Anderson @cite_17 authenticate users by imprinting,' in analogy to ducklings acknowledging the first moving subject they see as their mother. In OCEAN, we do not attempt to secure the routing layer, although our techniques may be used in conjunction with many secure routing protocols to increase performance and robustness.