On the Protection of Link State Routing and Discovery of PKI Certificate Chains in MANET

Abstract

The growing awareness of the network vulnerability draws much attention to security from both the academic community and industrial society. Security is no longer a luxury but an independent and indispensable service to the current Internet. While various security mechanisms such as cryptographic and intrusion detection techniques have been proposed, designed, and even deployed in the field, the newly exposed network vulnerabilities and the emerging network technologies create new security challenges which make the existing security solutions either inefficient or insufficient. My Ph D research focuses on the efficient protection on link state routing and the self-organizing and self-dependent hierarchical public key certificate management in the emerging mobile ad hoc networks. The contributions of this thesis include two parts. In the first part, a cost reduced secure link state routing protocol with the capability of detecting disruptive links is proposed to efficiently protect the routing control messages (e.g., LSA) and trace the faulty intermediate routers; then a confidence extended routing mechanism enhanced with secure virtual links is designed to increase network reachability through selectively including the uncertain routers in packet relaying and further continuously monitoring the behaviors of those selected uncertain routers. A theoretical security analysis and an experimental evaluation are conducted to prove the feasibility and advantages of this new design under various rates of false alarms. In the second part, an approach is presented to discover the optimal PKI certificate path even without help from centralized certificate entities in the non-centralized and infrastructureless mobile ad hoc network and a secured and distributed certificate-chain searching protocol is developed to collect the needed certificates on the fly in the mobile ad hoc network.