An Integrated Security Framework for Access Control and Address Auto-Configuration for MANETs

Abstract

As mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) continue to receive an increasing attention in research due to its vast amount of applications, security is becoming one of the main research challenges. Most of the proposed research in MANET security focused on secure routing and key management. In this paper, we propose an access control mechanism with features that is inherited to produce a secure address auto-configuration scheme providing a framework that guarantee access control and secure address auto-configuration for MANET nodes utilizing the concepts of identity-based cryptography and threshold secret sharing. Our mechanism provides key management service without any assumption of a prefixed trust relationship between nodes, which effectively resolves the problem of single point of failure in the traditional public key infrastructure. Simulations showed that the proposed architecture enhance QoS level compared to the existing approaches that aims to provide only access control or address auto-configuration separately. With a similar or a lower cost, our integrated approach enhanced MANET security and performance.