A Cumulative Authentication Method for Securing Source Routing Protocols in Ad Hoc Networks

Initial works in ad hoc routing have considered only the problem of providing efficient mechanisms for finding paths in such networks, without considering security as a major problem. In such a trusted environment, malicious behaviors can disturb routing process. We present the design and performance evaluation of a new secure on-demand routing protocol for ad hoc networks, called CASR. CASR is robust against attackers from outside of the network and even it prevents compromised nodes from tampering with uncompromised routes consisting of uncompromised nodes. Because of using symmetric cryptography in its structure, CASR is robust against large number of types of denial-of-service attacks. However, due to the applying of the random key predistributions method to the routing process our proposed scheme reaches a trade-off between the degree of security and complexity.