Secure Authentication Scheme for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs), it is easy to launch wormhole, man-in-the-middle and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, or to impersonate another node. The authors' studies show that there are performance and security problems with the existing authentication and keying mechanisms which are currently employed by wireless ad hoc networks. They propose a secure authentication scheme, namely BLS signature. This scheme eliminates the correlation among packets and thus provides the perfect resilience to packet loss, and it is also efficient in terms of latency, computation, and communication overhead due to an efficient cryptographic primitive called batch signature, which supports the authentication of any number of packets simultaneously.