Automated Evaluation of Secure Route Discovery in MANET Protocols

Evaluation techniques to analyze security properties in ad hoc routing protocols generally rely on manual, non-exhaustive approaches. Non-exhaustive analysis techniques may conclude a protocol is secure, while in reality the protocol may contain an unapparent or subtle flaw. Using formalized exhaustive evaluation techniques to analyze security properties increases protocol confidence. In this paper, we offer an automated evaluation process to analyze security properties in the route discovery phase for on-demand source routing protocols. Using our automated security evaluation process, we are able to produce and analyze all topologies for a given network size. The individual network topologies are fed into the SPIN model checker to exhaustively evaluate protocol abstractions against an attacker attempting to corrupt the route discovery process.