An Active-Routing Authentication Scheme in MANET

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) is a network mode that does not depend on network infrastructure and central access. The fast and flexible networking mode of MANET renders its wide applications in specific scenarios. However, rapidly changing topology and open channels bring potential security problems. In this paper, we proposed an active-routing authentication scheme (AAS) based on the characteristics of active routing protocols. We formally demonstrated that the AAS is effective against selective forwarding attack, false routing attack, byzantine attack and route spoofing attack using the BAN logic considering the possibility of malicious nodes mingling in MANET. Experimental results show that the AAS is compatible with multiple active routing protocols and it is able to increase the packet delivery rate by 33.9%, with an average increase of 18.4% in the network containing some malicious nodes. Furthermore, the AAS is robust which remains the average network connection rate reach 1.6 times of the collusion attack prevention-OLSR(Cap-OLSR) protocol and preserves 79.2% of the network performance in simulation experiments with attacks from malicious nodes.