An integrated and flexible approach to robust and secure routing for wireless multihop ad-hoc networks

This paper introduces robust and secure routing (RoST), an integrated and flexible approach to secure routing in wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). RoST incorporates robustness and security into the underlying MANET routing protocol. By using a layered approach, RoST offers flexibility to the target MANET application to choose the required level of security. Most secure MANET routing solutions to-date either assume that security services (e.g., key distribution) is handled externally or propose cryptographic schemes that target MANETs. RoST, on the other hand, combines both robustness and security techniques integrating them into a protocol suite. At its core, it takes advantage of the network's inherent redundancy to efficiently discover multiple routes ensuring robust delivery; additional layers provide in-built key exchange, authentication, data integrity and privacy. We implemented RoST by extending the dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol. Through simulations, we demonstrate how RoST can circumvent security attacks. We also show that, under normal operating conditions, RoST and DSR exhibit similar performance. Thus, RoST is able to provide robustness and security without significantly impacting performance.