A Scalable Wireless Routing Protocol Secure against Route Truncation Attacks

• Published in: Communications and Multimedia Security pp. 4 - 15
• Main Authors: Saxena, Amitabh, Soh, Ben
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2010
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Aggregate Signature; Border Gateway Protocol; Chain Signature; Signature Scheme; Wireless Network
• ISBN: 9783642132407; 3642132405
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-13241-4_2

Wireless routing protocols allow transmitting nodes to have some knowledge of the topology in order to decide when to forward a packet (via broadcast) and when to drop it. Since a routing protocol forms the backbone of any network, it is a lucrative target for attacks. Routing protocols for wired networks (such as S-BGP) are not scalable in an ad-hoc wireless environment because of two main drawbacks: (1) the need to maintain knowledge about all immediate neighbors (which requires a discovery protocol), and (2) the need to transmit the same update several times, one for each neighbor. Although information about neighbors is readily available in a fairly static and wired network, such information is often not updated or available in an ad-hoc wireless network with mobile devices. Consequently, S-BGP is not suitable for such scenarios. We propose a BGP-type wireless routing protocol for such networks that does not suffer from such drawbacks. The protocol uses a novel authentication primitive called Enhanced Chain Signatures (ECS).