A Variant of Merkle Signature Scheme to Protect AODV Routing Protocol

Abstract

Wireless mobile Ad-Hoc networks (MANETs) are networks of mobile nodes with no fixed infrastructures. Their peer-to-peer communication architectures over shared wireless medium with no clear line of defense pose a number of challenges to security design. Some previous works have used a form of digital signature for protection. However, there are still limitations in the implementation. This paper1 proposes a variant of the Merkle Signature Scheme (MSS) to protect an Ad-Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol, a common routing protocol for MANETs. The new protocol is named Extra Secure AODV or ESAODV in short. ESAODV provides hop-count protection, digital signature and protocol enforcement. Through these features several security benefits on the routing packets have been established, namely fast authentication, integrity, and non-repudiation. Several experiments have been conducted using different digital signatures of the MSS variant signatures. The result shows that ESAODV is effective for combating routing attacks, and works properly although the malicious are 20% of the nodes total number in MANETs. In terms of features, ESAODV are also far superior than secure AODV (SAODV) and Authenticated Routing for Ad hoc Networks (ARAN). © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.