A new secure route discovery protocol for MANETs to prevent hidden channel attacks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new secure route discovery protocol for MANETs that overcomes the vulnerabilities of Ariadne and EndairA, due to hidden channel attacks. It uses 'authentic neighborhood' for route discovery process which potentially protects hidden channels of routing control packets, besides ensuring authenticity and integrity of routing control messages at hop-by-hop level. This authentic neighborhood is augmented by a process of traceability which uses promiscuous mode of a node to detect, diagnose and isolate the adversarial nodes, that disrupt the route discovery process. We observe, from the comparative analysis of the proposed protocol with Ariadne and EndiarA, that the proposed protocol has a balance between security and computational overhead. Security analysis and formal verification, through extended BAN logic and AVISPA toolkit, shows that the proposed protocol is safe against the vulnerabilities identified in Ariadne and EndairA, due to unprotected hidden channels.