Tiered Authentication of Multicast Traffic in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

Multicast streams are the dominant application traffic pattern in many mission critical ad-hoc networks. The limited computation and communication resources, the large scale deployment and the unguaranteed connectivity to trusted authorities make known security solutions for wired and singlehop wireless networks inappropriate for such application environment. This paper promotes a novel Tiered Authentication scheme for Multicast traffic (TAM) for large scale dense ad-hoc networks. Nodes are grouped into clusters. Multicast traffic within the same cluster employs one-way chains in order to authenticate the message source. Cross-cluster multicast traffic includes a message authentication codes (MACs) that are based on a set of keys. Each cluster uses a unique subset of keys to look for its distinct combination of valid MACs in the message in order to authenticate the source. TAM thus combines the advantages of the secret information asymmetry and the time asymmetry paradigms and exploits network clustering to reduce overhead and ensure scalability. The numerical and analytical results demonstrate the performance advantage of TAM.

A source authentication scheme using network coding

“…TAM aims to decrease the overhead of authentication in addition to provide efficient security. Unlike (Younis and Farrag, 2009), we provide authentication using a simple, yet powerful, tweak to network coding already in use in the network under investigation.…”

“…Studer et al (2008) modified the well-known TESLA Scheme so that it becomes resilient to Denial of Service (DOS) attacks, especially in vehicular ad hoc networks. Younis and Farrag (2009) promotes a Tiered Authentication scheme for multicast traffic (TAM). TAM assigns a subset of keys for each cluster in the network.…”

Increasing the Lifetime of Ad Hoc Networks Using Hierarchical Cluster-based Power Management

“…In this paper, we bring up a method called Cluster-based [10][11] [12][13] [14][15] [16][17] [18][19] [20][21] [22][23] [24] Power Management (CPM) to decrease the power consumption of mobile phones. A necessity of IEEE 802.11 power management protocol for ad hoc networks is that each mobile host must get timing synchronization in one hop distance.…”