A novel signature scheme to secure distributed dynamic address configuration protocol in mobile ad hoc networks

Secure distributed IP addressing is a prime requirement in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) for unicast communication. Several types of security threats have been observed in most of the proposed dynamic addressing approaches as they rely on broadcasting for address solicitation and/ or duplicate address detection. In this paper, we propose an ID based distributed dynamic IP configuration scheme to securely allocate IP addresses to the authorized hosts for a MANET without broadcasting over the entire network. Each host can generate unique IP addresses from its own IP address and can assign those addresses to the new nodes. In addition, we propose a novel signature scheme that authenticates and lessens the security threats associated with dynamic IP configuration. Proof of correctness of the proposed signature scheme verifies that the scheme is secure against any forgery attack. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed addressing scheme has low overhead and fairly good addressing latency with added security mechanisms as compared to similar existing dynamic configuration schemes. Moreover, the proposed scheme is robust and can efficiently solve the problem of network partitions and mergers.