Ad hoc network security: peer identification and authentication using signal properties

Abstract

As networking architectures grow and develop, the pace of security in these networks must keep pace. This paper is interested in identification and authentication in ad hoc networks, which are particularly susceptible to identity attacks, such as masquerading and malicious alias attacks. To mitigate these identity attacks, we propose to associate the message transmitter with a location and use this location information to reason about identity. There are several cooperative location schemes detailed in the literature, but because we cannot assume that a malicious party would cooperate in a location scheme, we propose to determine transmitter location by using the physical properties of the received signal.