A dynamic trust and mutual authentication scheme for MANET security

Ihsan, M

Abstract

MANETs are attractive technology in providing communication in the absence of a fixed infrastructure for applications such as, first responders at a disaster site or soldiers in a battlefield (Kumar, and Mishra, 2012). The rapid growth MANET has experienced in recent years is due to its Ad Hoc capabilities that have also made it prime target of cybercrimes (Jhaveri, 2012). This has raised the question of how could we embrace the benefits of MANET without the increased security risks. MANETs have several vulnerabilities such as lack of a central point, mobility, wireless links, limited energy resources, a lack of clear line of defence, cooperative nature and non-secure communication to mention a few.


This research proposes a two-phase scheme. In phase-one a novel approach is suggested by using concept of exiting trust schemes and adopting the use of Dynamic Trust Threshold Scheme (DTTS) for the selection of trusted nodes in the network and using mutual trust acknowledgement scheme of neighbour nodes to authenticate two communicating nodes. The notion of trust is used for authenticating peer nodes. The trust scheme algorithm is based on real time network dynamics, relevant to MANET conditions, as opposed to pre-determined static values. The phase-one is implemented in AODV and tested in a simulated environment using NS2. The reason for using AODV is that it’s reactive and has comparatively low routing overhead, low energy consumption and relatively better performance (Morshed, et al 2010). In order to ensure data confidentiality and end-to-end security, in phase-two, the source and destination generates a shared secret key to communicate with each other using a highly efficient Diffie Hellman Elliptic Curve scheme (Wang, Ramamurthy and Zou, 2006). The shared key is used to encrypt data between the peer nodes.

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Acceptance Date: Sep 28, 2018
• Deposit Date: Oct 3, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 28, 2020