Hop-Count Authentication with Moving Keys for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Considering the diversity of possible attacks in mobile ad hoc networks, it would be difficult to come up with a comprehensive solution approach that may be used to detect/defend against various types of attacks while minimizing resource usages. To prevent attacks like wormhole attacks, the authenticity of nodes in packet delivery path needs to be validated. We are developing a new hop-count authentication technique by which a receiver may probabilistically authenticate the number of authentic hops a packet has traversed. The bandwidth, memory, and processing overheads are to be acceptable in the protocol implementation. The probabilistic guarantees will be derived from the security analysis of the protocol.