Secure Neighbor Discovery through Overhearing in Static Multihop Wireless Networks

In wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks, neighbor discovery is one of the first steps performed by a node upon deployment and disrupting it adversely affects a number of routing, MAC, topology discovery and intrusion detection protocols. It is especially harmful when an adversary can convince nodes that it is a legitimate neighbor, which it can do easily and without the use of cryptographic primitives. In this paper, we develop a secure neighbor discovery protocol, SEDINE, for static multihop wireless networks. We prove that, in the absence of packet losses, without using any centralized trusted node or specialized hardware, SEDINE prevents any node, legitimate or malicious, from being incorrectly added to the neighbor list of another legitimate node that is not within its transmission range. We provide simulation results to demonstrate the efficacy of SEDINE, in the presence of packet losses.