A Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The characteristics of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) determine that the authentication approaches to protect routing and data packet transmission in MANETs should be lightweight and scalable. In this paper, we propose a lightweight authentication protocol, which utilizes one-way hash chain to provide effective and efficient authentication for communications between neighboring nodes in MANETs. Delayed key disclosure scheme is used to prevent from in-the-middle attack on key release. The security properties of the protocol are analyzed in the paper. We also demonstrate simulation results and performance analysis on trust management, message authentication and the delayed key disclosure approach. The analysis shows that the protocol incurs low overhead penalty and achieves a low dropped packet rate on key disclosure with a cache of fair size. Keyword: MANET, security, authentication, one-way hash function.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ITCC
• Authors: Bin Lu, Udo W. Pooch
• Keywords: Authentication, Delayed Key Disclosure, Information Technology, ITCC 2005, One-way Hash