Mobile Ad Hoc Network Security Issues

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a new kind of wireless mobile network, with advantages of easy networking, fast self-organization, strong adaptability, low cost etc, and has broad application prospects in the military and commercial fields. Meanwhile, because of the features of MANET, such as wireless channel interference, mobile nodes, dynamic topology, no-centrality etc, MANET is more vulnerable to attacks than stationary network. Since the traditional network security facilities are not suitable to MANET, research on the security issues of MANET is needed and the MANET security service system should be established to ensure safety. This dissertation conducts research on network security issues of MANET, including security infrastructures, such as identity authentication mechanisms, secure routing protocols etc, and security applications, such as fair non-repudiation protocols of information exchange.The main works of the dissertation includes the following aspects:1) Research on distributed authentication of MANET. Because there's no central node in MANET, the traditional authentication mechanisms based on authentication center (CA) doesn't adapt to the environment of MANET. In this dissertation, a secure distributed authentication scheme based on multi-hop signing with encrypted signature functions is proposed to prevent private key shares from leaking. Several related works, such as finding and clearing Byzatine nodes, defending mobile attack to nodes etc, have been studied in this thesis as well.2) Research on secure routing protocols. In this dissertation, the methods of routing attacks to MANET are analyzed and summarized first, and then a new secure routing protocol based on dynamic cellular and identity authentication is proposed. With the advantages of dynamic cellular, the protocol successfully ensures routing security for MANET, while reduces performance loss of security operations by lessening authenticated nodes and routing messages.3) Research on fair non-repudiation protocols. The fair non-repudiation means that when the information transmission finishes, the message receiver will get the evidence from the originator, and vice versa. Most fair non-repudiation protocols depend on trusted third party (TTP), and they are not suitable for MANET without central nodes. In this dissertation, fair non-repudiation protocols for MANET are studied. Firstly, a new fair non-repudiation protocol without TTP based on node's computing abilities is proposed. This protocol solves security problems occurs when the computing abilities of both parties are not equal, but it is still a probabilistic protocol with a failure probability ε. Then, a new fair non-repudiation protocol based on quantum one-way functions and quantum public keys signatures with quantum trusted third party (QTTP) is proposed, and it is more secure than classic protocols especially facing to quantum attacks. Finally, an efficient quantum fair non-repudiation protocol based on previous one is introduced. This protocol avoids the severe dependency to QTTP, and improves its efficiency and reliability, so it is more applicable to MANET.