Safeguarding Mutable Fields in AODV Route Discovery Process

Assuring cryptographic integrity of mutable fields in any on-demand ad hoc routing protocol is more challenging than that of non mutable fields. We propose an efficient authentication strategy for this purpose, which leverages a proposed broadcast encryption (BE) scheme. We investigate some shortcomings of SAODV, a popular secure extension of the ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) protocol and suggest some modifications to the protocol to overcome the shortcomings. The modifications include proactive maintenance of a secure reliable delivery neighborhood (RDN) by each node and the use of the BE based authentication strategy for mutable fields.