AMSPR: A Secure Multipath Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET)

Multipath routing in MANET has primarily been used for load balancing and reliability. There are some protocols where this routing technique has been considered for secure message transmission. Messages are split and transmitted through different paths to the destination. For these split multipath routing strategy, we need node disjoint paths to every destination node. We propose in this paper AMSPR (All-or-nothing transformation based Secure Multipath Routing), a routing technique where the encrypted secret message is split into multiple shares and those shares are transmitted through multiple node-disjoint paths to the destination. Message shares are generated in such a way that the original secret message can be retrieved if and only if all the shares are put together in the receiver. We have devised a fraction-key based encryption technique for transforming the message. If an eavesdropper tries to get hold of the secret message, it has to sneak into all the wireless paths concurrently. If it succeeds to do so, which is very unlikely in a dynamic wireless environment like MANET, the attacker has to guess all the keys used for encryption. Our main goal is to achieve a mechanism where it can be assured that if a message is split into 'N' numbers of shares and an attacker succeeds to obtain (N-1) transmitted shares along with the user provided keys, then also the probability that the whole message will be retrieved tends to zero.