Secure routing with key pre-distribution using mds codes in mobile ad hoc networks
Seong-Moo Yoo, Mohammad Al-Shurman · 2006
Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) present the next great challenge for distributed systems research where the participants are used to route communication traffic from senders to receivers. Before establishing a secure communication link, the node should be able to identify another node. As a result, a node needs to provide its identity as well as associated credentials to another node. In this dissertation, secure routing schemes with key pre-distribution are presented. First, a key pre-distribution scheme is proposed. The main idea of the scheme is to use a global maximum distance separable (MDS) code to generate nodes' keys. Every node who wants to join the network can retrieve the MDS generator code (G matrix), and then will generate a random vector within the Galois field. This vector will be used to generate all the keys for the node. Next, a distributed co-operative key management system is proposed. The system is to generate and deliver the keys based on threshold cryptography. Each node will be provided with a group of keys (key chain) when it joins the network. This key chain is used to derive all future keys for this node such that any two nodes can calculate symmetric keys based on these key chains. Then, a vectorized broadcast routing scheme is proposed. The scheme reduces the broadcast by enlarging the broadcast region around the destination. In case of discovery failure, the scheme will enlarge the broadcast region again around the destination unlike the existing schemes where the network is flooded with this request. Lastly, two solutions are presented to avoid the black hole problem. Here, a malicious node uses the routing protocol to advertise itself as having the shortest path to the node whose packets the malicious node wants to intercept. The first is to find more than one route to the destination. The second is to exploit the packet sequence number included in any packet header. Computer simulation shows that compared to the original ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing scheme, the second solution can considerably improve the verification of the route to the destination at a minimum cost of the delay in the networks.