Secure and Robust IPV6 Autoconfiguration Protocol For Mobile Adhoc Networks Under Strong Adversarial Model

Abstract

Automatic IP address assignment in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) enables nodes to obtain routable addresses without any infrastructure. Different protocols have been developed throughout the last years to achieve this service. However, research primarily focused on correctness, efficiency and scalability; much less attention has been given to the security issues. The lack of security in the design of such protocols opens the possibility of many real threats leading to serious attacks in potentially hostile environments. Recently, few schemes have been proposed to solve this problem, but none of them has brought satisfactory solutions. Auto-configuration security issues are still an open problem. In this paper, a robust and secure stateful IP address allocation protocol for standalone MANETs is specified and evaluated within NS2. Our solution is based on mutual authentication, and a fully distributed Autoconfiguration and CA model, in conjunction with threshold cryptography. By deploying a new concept of joint IP address and public key certificate, we show that, instead of earlier approaches, our solution solves the problem of all possible attacks associated with dynamic IP address assignment in MANETs. The resulting protocol incurs low latency and control overhead