Bootstrapping security associations for routing in mobile ad-hoc networks

— To date, most solutions proposed for secure routing in mobile, ad-hoc networks (MANETs) assume that secure associations between pairs of nodes can be established on-line; e.g., by a trusted third party, by distributed trust establishment. However, establishing such security associations, with or without trusted third parties, requires reliance on routing layer security. In this paper, we eliminate this apparent cyclic dependency between security services and secure routing in MANETs and show how to bootstrap security for the routing layer. We use the notion of statistically unique and cryptographically verifiable (SUCV) identifiers to implement a secure binding between IP addresses and keys that is independent of any trusted security service. We illustrate our solution with the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol and argue that the solution is applicable to other protocols such as SEAD and Ariadne. We evaluate the cost of the DSR solution with simulations over ns-2 and present some preliminary results.