Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Security

Ad hoc networks are new paradigm of wireless networks, which can be quickly put up to provide mobile communication without any underlying infrastructure anytime and anywhere. Owing to their flexible connection and convenient application, ad hoc networks are getting more and more attention from international academe and industrial community. In addition, there are certain circumstances where no other networks but ad hoc network can work. Application of ad hoc networks is getting wider and wider and research on ad hoc networks has already become one important direction in mobile communication technology.Security is a critical issue for potential application of mobile ad hoc networks. But providing security in ad hoc networks is challenging due to all the characteristics of these networks, such as the vulnerability of the wireless links, the limited physical protection of each node or the dynamically changing topology. Ad hoc networks are very crisp, and they are more vulnerable compared to traditional networks. And it is very hard to secure an ad hoc network without any fixed infrastructure.In this dissertation, we investigate a series of security problems in ad hoc networks, such as security architecture, key management, secure routing etc. Our main contribution is as follows:1. Based on an in-depth analysis of security threats of ad hoc networks, a secure architecture is provided, which has characteristics of integrated defense and cross-layer design. It builds three lines of defense, that is to say, intrusion prevention mechanism, intrusion detection and response mechanism, and intrusion tolerance mechanism, by deploying multiple security mechanism in protocol stack. It also requires that information from different layers should be made full use of to improve protocol performance by cross-layer design.2. Key management schemes are provided for complanate and clustered ad hoc networks respectively to establish basic trust relationship of nodes. Our schemes utilize ID-based sign(?)ryption mechanism, which decreases the need of computing and storage abilities of clients' terminals, as well as communication cost for system key management.3. Several secure routing protocols are proposed for some popular ad hoc routing protocols.