Optimistic Tracing in MANET

Mobile ad hoc networks are collections of wireless mobile nodes with links that are made or broken in an arbitrary way. They have constrained resources, restricted broadcast range and no fixed infrastructure. For these networks communication is achieved via routes whose nodes relay packets. Several routing algorithms have been proposed in the literature. These focus mainly on efficiency with security relegated to weak adversary models, particularly with regard to fault tolerance in malicious settings. Our goal in this paper is to develop a formal security framework for analyzing fault-tolerant routing in malicious environments. Our simulation framework allows for strong adversary models and preserves fault-tolerance in the universal composability paradigm. We present optimistic tracing protocols and prove their security in this model and show how they can be composed with existing, well-established routing algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, these are the only protocols that guarantee message delivery in a strong adversary model.