Research On Essential Security Issues Of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) consists of a set of wireless mobile nodes. Without relying on any fixed network infrastructure and centralized administration, those mobile nodes can cooperatively form a temporary multi-hop autonomous network, which can be quickly and inexpensively set up as need. In recent years, this new wireless networking technique has been receiving growing attention from both academia and industry, and has already been an important direction in wireless communication technology. Security support is indispensable for typical security aware applications of MANETs such as military operations and disaster rescue missions. However, restricted by the salient characteristics of these networks, security still puses a rigorous challenge in MANETs.By considering the special technical characteristics and the potential application environment of MANETs, this dissertation makes an in-depth research on some important sub-areas of security of MANETs, including security architecture, key management, secure routing and secure communication etc al. The main contributions of this dissertation can be summarized as following:1. From the view of typical security requirements of MANETs, A three-dimensional framework of security architecture is poposed. Generic security architecture is very important to understand security conceptions and design actual security systems. However, in the context of MANETs, no generic security architecture has been accepted by academia. Aiming at this situation, based on in-depth analysis of security attacks to MANETs and summarize the topical security requirements of MANETs, a three-dimensional framework of security architecture is proposed. This framework studys the security architecture of MANETs by three views, namely, network security requriments view, network communicating protocols view and network basic-components view. Finally, the place of current popular security techniques for MANETs in this framework is organiszed, and the method of using this framework to guide designing actual security system is discussed.2. To resolve certificate revocation problem in the key management schemes based on the public key certificate technique, based on the one-way hash chain, a new certificate revocation mechanism is proposed. Multiple key management schemes based on public key certificate technique have been proposed for MANETs. However, most of these schemes can't address the certificate revocation problem very well, and existing certificate revocation mechanisms place a considerable processing, communication, and storage overheads on the nodes. Compared with the existing certificate revocation mechanisms, this new certificate revocation mechanism has three advantages: firstly, the individual mobile node takes charge of its own certificate status by releasing a periodically updated hash value. It can increase the flexibility of certificate usage by setting appropriate status refresh period. Secondly, the node can check the status of other node's certificate by verifying the hash value received from other node, without retrieving the revocation information from on-line trusted third party. Thirdly, this new mechanism uses the...