Efficient authentication schemes for routing in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) has been generally regarded as an ideal network model for group communications. However, the security deployment for MANET routing operations is problematic. Firstly, existing secured routing protocols are deficient in achieving both authentication efficiency and full scale of security. In addition, the diversity of routing protocols presents difficulties in the generalisation of the security design. The most possible candidate solution,the digital signature, has far from been properly implemented from an ad hoc point of view. In this thesis, we are motivated to provide necessary security features to MANET routing operations in an efficient manner. Considering the feasibility of utilising digital signatures in MANET, we incorporate the notion of the online/offline signature scheme in our design, where the computational overhead is shifted to the offline phase. We also make use of the one-time signature scheme, which is efficient in computation, and the multisignature scheme, which is especially suitable for group authentication. Then, we observe the specialities of different routing protocols (AODV-ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing and DSR-dynamic source routing), as well as the similarities between above signature schemes. In our design, we exploit the efficiency and the adaptability of signature schemes. As our contributions, we propose two authentication schemes to secure AODV and DSR protocol respectively. For AODV protocol, our ID-based online/offline signature schemes enhance the authentication performance by properly balancing the computational overhead, whereas the one-time signature scheme achieves the same objective by making trade-offs between computation power and memory storage. For DSR protocol, we provide a generic construction from ID-based online/offline signature schemes to ID-based multisignature schemes, so that the installation over AODV can be transformed to offer the same level of security for DSR. Our scheme is unique, in the sense that a single ID-based online/offline signature scheme can be applied to both AODV and DSR routing protocols.