An authentication service based on trust and clustering in wireless ad hoc networks: description and security evaluation
Edith C.‐H. Ngai, M.R. Lyu · 2006
Security in wireless ad hoc networks is hard to achieve due to the vulnerability of its links, limited physical protec-tion, and the absence of a centralized management point. Consequently, novel approaches are necessary to address the security problem without sacrificing the essential prop-erties of the wireless ad hoc network. Similar to other dis-tributed systems, security in wireless ad hoc networks usu-ally relies on the use of key management mechanisms. In this paper, we present a distributed public key authentica-tion service to protect the network containing malicious and colluding nodes. Our solution was built on a clustering-based network model and a trust model. These models al-low mobile hosts to monitor and rate each other with an au-thentication metric. We also propose a new system of public key certification in conjunction with a trust value update algorithm. Our authentication service is able to discover and isolate malicious and colluding nodes in the network. Finally, we perform security evaluation on the proposed so-lution. We simulate a network containing malicious nodes and measure a number of metrics with various security op-erations to demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme. 1.