Authentication Scheme for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

-The technological progress of recent years made available devices for a large audience, which is powerful enough to randomly form Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MAHNWs). However the spread of MAHNWs is still obstructed by unsettled technical issues. Besides the topics related to the functionality of a MAHNW (e.g. location of mobile stations, routing protocols) the proliferation of the MAHNWs is conditioned by the existence of security services. The primary target user group is the business community, since it has both the motivation and financial strength to use MAHNWs. In this environment authentication and availability is especially sensitive question. This paper proposes an authentication scheme for MAHNWs. It provides a basic authentication service even for the nodes, which cannot present a valid certification. The basic idea is to exploit the broadcasting capability of the radio signals. In such an environment the messages sent by a potential attacker is always available for its neighbors, each sender can monitor the next hop, whether it forwards the correct data or cheats. Thus we can eliminate the man-in-themiddle and denial-of-service attacks and limit the possibility of false authentication to some special cases. With the intention to further improve the mechanism the MAHNW is partitioned in domains. This technique also avoids broadcast storms and improves performance.