Research And Implementation Of MANET Security Architecture

With the development of military, economy and society, varieties of network have achieved increasingly wide use. MANET is playing important roles in many applications thanks to its inherent characteristics. However, compared with fixed, wired network, it's vulnerable to security attacks due to warless media, multiple hop routing and mobile devices, etc. Relevant security issues have attracted growing attention, but we are yet to see an integrated solution which has stricken balance between security and performance including scalability. This thesis aims to propose an MANET security architecture satisfying various needs and test its feasibility through theoretic analysis and simulation.Authentication is a key technology securing the network. However, because PKI with central CA is hard to deploy in MANET, conventional authentication mechanism isn't practical. This thesis present and evaluate an architecture serving to secure MANET communication. We divide network into domains to implement a distributed CA via threshold encryption and secret scattering. This architecture solves authority and access control effectively with a multi-level security model which enables the match between complexity and functions of mobile ends: supporting different type of keys (symmetric, asymmetric public key) and certificates. Required security level is determined by node, and then appropriate encryption mechanism is adopted.Security of presented solution is ensured by certificate without specifying details of implementation which could be adjusted according to specific security and performance requirement. This thesis focuses on performance including scalability rather than security.OMNet++ is adopted for simulation taking two mobility models into account with aim to close to practical application and ensures comparability. Evaluation of log-in time, availability and overhead prove roles of different parameters and feasibility of our architecture.This paper is structured as follows: Chapter one covers the background and purpose of the paper. Chapter two gives a background to all the security services and the security mechanisms that provide them. Chapter three describes in detail the properties and security threats related to ad hoc networks. Chapter four describes the domain-based MANET security architecture and chapter five the evaluation through OMNeT++, a discrete events simulator. Chapter six concludes this paper and gives work in the future as well.