Integrating Encryption Technique in Authentication of Multicast Protocol for Ad-Hoc Networks

Ad-hoc networks are infrastructure-less and without central administration control, minimal configuration and quick deployment make ad-hoc networks suitable for emergency situations like natural disasters or military conflicts. These applications require multicast data transmissions and the data has to be securely passed through the network to the intended receivers. The techniques that are applied for security should also prevent an opponent from learning the contents of these transmissions. Several authentication protocols have been proposed to improve the security of multicast traffic. But not much work has been done on transmitting the data securely in multicast traffic. In the proposed method symmetric encryption is applied to provide confidentiality along with message authentication codes. The performance of various symmetric algorithms such as AES, DES, 3DES and blowfish to the proposed method is analyzed. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of each algorithm.