Exploiting Multiple Paths in Multi-hop Co-operative Ad-Hoc Networks for Providing Security without Trusted Third Party

Abstract

Ensuring secure communication in large scale wireless networks is a challenging issue, especially when the nodes participating in the network itself cannot be trusted fully. This situation is very much pertinent in the case of multi-hop wireless cooperative networks, where the nodes co-operate with each other to support multi-hop communication in the network. In such networks, assuming the presence of a trusted third party to provide key exchange and authentication services in the network is not viable. Additionally, the classical Diffie-Hellman based key establishment mechanism as such cannot be used because of Man-In-The-Middle and impersonation attacks, as the nodes participating in a multi-hop path from source to destination cannot be trusted. In this paper, we investigate the use of the multi-paths and secret sharing in multi-hop cooperative adhoc networks to provide practical secure communication between the nodes in the network. We propose a couple of routing algorithms that give multiple-paths to send different segments of information required to be communicated securely, under various behavioral models of the participating nodes. The simulation results show that the majority of times, we are able to find the multiple paths in the network through which the different segments of a piece of information can be sent to achieve desirable security.