UGSP: Authentication Based Secure Protocol for Ad-Hoc Networks

A wireless ad-hoc network is a collection of mobile nodes with no fixed infrastructure. Security in such networks poses serious challenges due to (i) the network connectivity could be intermittent and hence on-line authentication is not guaranteed, and (ii) susceptible to wide range of attacks due to broadcast communication and large scale number of users. In this paper, we propose a security protocol, called UGSP, for wireless ad-hoc networks using a tamper-proof hardware. We show that the proposed protocol fits well with the resurrecting duckling security paradigm (Stajano and Anderson, 1999). Once the hardware is imprinted for authentication, UGSP is robust to man-in-the-middle attack, passive eavesdropping, active impersonation attacks ensuring source authentication, data confidentiality and data integrity for communication amongst nodes with identically configured hardware. The system is amenable to dynamic addition of new members whose hardware has also been imprinted with authentication information. We provide a comparative evaluation of UGSP with other approaches and show that UGSP is scalable and cost-effective.