Design And Implementation Of A Secure Authentication Algorithm For Wireless Ad-hoc Networks

With the adventure of the Bluetooth technology, more attentions are paid to the wireless ad-hoc networks. As a self-organized and self-adaptive network, the wireless ad-hoc network has the following features: self-organization, multi-hopping, dynamic and ever-changing topology, restrained communication bandwidth, and constraint computing power. On the one hand, the features make wireless ad hoc networks more vulnerable to security threats. Thus its security has attracted tremendous attentions. On the other hand, the inherent features make the traditional security technologies not applicable to the wireless ad-hoc networks. So the security solutions are desired in order to make the wireless ad-hoc network more widely used.According to the user’s behavior process in a security system, we should firstly authenticate the users’ identity and then communicate with encryption. The secure authentication algorithm is in fact the first line of defense to construct a security system.To build a practical authentication algorithm for the wireless ad-hoc networks, the dissertation contains the following contributions.1. The secure authentication technology in the wireless ad-hoc networks is detailed, as well as the RSA-TBOS signcryption algorithm and its security proof. Inspired by the RSA-TOBS algorithm, we propose an authentication algorithm applicable to the wireless ad-hoc networks.2. The secure authentication algorithm is implemented based on the Open SSL library.The validity of the authentication algorithm is examined with respect to the following folds: the correctness of the random numbers, the correctness of the hash functions, the correctness of the encryption by using the RSA public key and the decryption by using the RSA secret key, and the correctness of the RSA signature with the secret key and the RSA verification with the public key. Then the running time of the algorithm is tested in the windows environment, and comparisons are made to verify the performance of the proposed authentication algorithm. Finally, the routing protocol is simulated by utilizing the NS-2 software to test the impacts of the authentication algorithm on the performance of the routing protocol. Analysis shows that the proposed authentication algorithm is efficient and can be applied to the wireless ad-hoc networks.