AUTHENTICATED ROUTE FORMATION AND EFFICIENT KEY MANAGEMENT SCHEMES FOR SECURING Ad Hoc NETWORKS
Rajani Devi Poosarla · OhioLink ETD Center (Ohio Library and Information Network) · 2003
Ad hoc networks provide a new approach for wireless communication.These networks have no pre-deployed infrastructure available for achieving end-to-end routing of packets in the network.Nodes communicate with each other without the intervention of centralized access points or base stations, so each node acts both as a router and as a host.Securing routing in ad hoc networks creates difficulties not present in traditional network: neither centrally administrated secure routers nor strict policy exists in an ad hoc network; the nodes in the networks can be highly mobile, thus rapidly changing the network topology and the presence or absence of links.So the routing in ad hoc networks is especially hard to accomplish securely, robustly and efficiently.Security primitives such as authentication, non-repudiation, data integrity and confidentiality, which would otherwise be provided by a central server, must be enabled by one or more network nodes.In this thesis, we focus on two issues of security, routing security and key management.We have discussed various threats to routing protocols in ad hoc networks and proposed methods to enhance the security of these protocols.We have put forth a new authentication scheme for on-demand routing protocols, specifically Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), by using public key cryptography in order to prevent the attacks against routing.The use of public key infrastructure in ad hoc networks raises the issue of key management.Certification of public keys of the nodes belonging to an ad hoc network is a non-trivial problem.Existing techniques for certifying keys are not well suited for ad hoc networks due to their sensitivity to single point of failure.We have defined a new key management paradigm, which can effectively deal with the challenges inherent in ad hoc networks and combat the attacks on the key management system itself.The proposed solution is then integrated into an existing hierarchical routing protocol. To My Dearest Husband