This work proposes a new distributed and self-organized authentication scheme for Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs). Apart from describing all its components, special emphasis is placed on proving that the proposal fulfils most requirements derived from the special characteristics of MANETs, including limited physical protection of broadcast medium, frequent route changes caused by mobility, and lack of structured hierarchy. Interesting conclusions are obtained from an analysis of simulation experiments in different scenarios.
This work provides both a new global authentication system for Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks and a study of its simulation with NS-2. The proposed scheme is constructed in a self-organizing manner, which implies the fulfillment of most requirements for this type of networks, such as adaptation to the changing topology of the network, public availability of broadcast communications and strength of access control. This paper describes a new protocol for authentication in ad-hoc networks. The protocol has been designed to meet specialized requirements of ad-hoc networks, such as lack of direct communication between nodes or requirements for revocable anonymity. At the same time, a ad-hoc authentication protocol must be resistant to spoofing, eavesdropping and playback, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The article analyzes existing authentication methods based on the Public Key Infrastructure, and finds that they have several drawbacks in ad-hoc networks. Therefore, a new authentication protocol, basing on established cryptographic primitives (Merkle's puzzles and zero-knowledge proofs) is proposed. The protocol is studied for a model ad-hoc chat application that provides private conversations. This work proposes a new global authentication system for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks. The component algorithms are designed in a self-organizing way so that most needs of this sort of networks are covered. In particular, characteristics such as adaptation to the varying topology of the network, open availability of broadcast transmissions, and strong access control have received special attention when defining the new scheme. The described protocol is based on the cryptographic paradigm of Zero-Knowledge Proofs. In this paper the design is thought for the Hamiltonian Cycle Problem, but it might be easily adapted to other NP-complete graph problems. In a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) architecture, there is no pre-existing fixed network infrastructure, and a mobile node in this network sends data packets to a destination node directly or through its neighbor nodes. This situation is of potential security concern since the neighbor nodes cannot be always trusted. In this paper, we design a group member authentication protocol used in a MANET. It aims to allow a set of nodes to legitimately participate in group communication and then distribute a secret group key to the approved nodes to establish secure communication with group members. Our protocol provides knowledge-based group member authentication, which recognizes a list of secret group keys held in a mobile node as the node's group membership. It employs zero knowledge proof and threshold cryptography. We then introduce our actual implementation and evaluate the behavior to ensure its successful deployment This work addresses the critical problem of authentication in mobile ad hoc networks. It includes a new approach based on the Zero-Knowledge cryptographic paradigm where two different security levels are defined. The first level is characterized by the use of an NP-complete graph problem to describe an Access Control Protocol, while the highest level corresponds to a Group Authentication Protocol based on a hard-on-average graph problem. The main goal of the proposal is to balance security strength and network performance. Therefore, both protocols are scalable and decentralized, and their requirements of communication, storage and computation are limited.