Towards an Integration of Security and Quality of Service in IP-Based Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Abstract-Security and quality of service (QoS) are two areas of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) research which have so far been largely carried out separately. Some of the unique characteristics of MANETs make them extremely vulnerable to security attacks, and these attacks have a direct impact on QoS provisioning. We therefore argue that integrating security and QoS may be the most effective way of providing QoS in MANETs that contain malicious nodes, and hypothesize that contextaware adaptive multi-path routing may mitigate the damaging effects of denial of availability (DoA) attacks, thus bettering QoS provisioning. As our first step towards validating this hypothesis, this paper investigates whether a single path should be sought using a reservation-based or a non-reservation-based approach.We compare INSIGNIA, a reservation-based approach to QoS in MANETs, with Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), a best-effort MANET routing protocol, using simulation. The performance of these two approaches is evaluated in the presence of a variable number of malicious nodes executing blackhole and grayhole data packet forwarding attacks and a denial of QoS attack. The simulation results show that INSIGNIA outperforms DSR when the traffic load is at a medium-to-high level and the threat level is at a low-to-medium level. This performance enhancement brought by INSIGNIA under these particular conditions is because of its single-path adaptation capability. These findings indicate that under certain conditions, e.g., when the network traffic level is low but the threat level is high, the single-path adaptation mechanism is no longer sufficient, and adaptive multipath routing may help to better QoS support.

A Lightweight Group-Key Management Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

“…We assume that a distributed certificate authority controls network membership [1,2], which means that this entity knows which are the nodes that can access the network. By network membership, we mean all the nodes that are authorized by a third party, such as a certificate authority, to access the network.…”

A 2-dimensional approach to QoS provisioning in adversarial mobile ad hoc network environments

“…However, the two issues are related. On one hand, it is difficult to support QoS in adversarial MANET environments without security provision: adaptive bandwidth reservations along a single path struggle to support QoS in the presence of attacks on data packets [13]; and blackhole attacks can prevent a QoS mechanism from adapting to the network conditions [14]. On the other hand, too much security provision will consume resources, and this may deplete the QoS which can be achieved.…”