Abstract
The pervasiveness of wireless communication recently gave mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) significant researchers’ attention, due to its innate capabilities of instant communication in many time and mission critical applications. However, its natural advantages of networking in civilian and military environments make it vulnerable to security threats. Support for anonymity in MANET is orthogonal to a critical security challenge we faced in this chapter. We propose a new anonymous authentication protocol for mobile ad hoc networks enhanced with a distributed reputation system. The main objective is to provide mechanisms concealing a real identity of communicating nodes with an ability of resistance to known attacks. The distributed reputation system is incorporated for a trust management and malicious behaviour detection in the network.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Attacks: Attacks on MANET can destroy availability of nodes (attacks on routing) and contest reputation of nodes.
Pseudonymity: Hides the user’s real identity behind some virtual identity called a pseudonym.
Privacy: The ability of keeping secret someone’s identity, resources, or actions. It is realized by anonymity and pseudonymity.
Authentication: A method of proving someone’s identity, especially if that someone is an authorized user of processes or resources.
Security: Security of a system means that the system does exactly what it is designed to do and nothing else, even in a case of attack. Secure MANET enables reliable routing: privacy of communication with immediate degree of authentication of the parties of the information exchange process.
Routing: A method of selecting a path (a chain of links between neighbouring nodes) from a source node to a destination node. One can distinguish two groups of protocols designed for MANET: reactive (on-demand) and proactive (table-driven). The first type tries to resolve a path to a destination node on the source node demand, whereas the second approach is more preventive and continuously keeps routing tables up to date by monitoring the nearest neighbourhood.
Cross-Validation: A statistical method derived from cross-classification which main objective is to detect the outlying point in a population set. It is a candidate method for anomalies detection in the reputation sharing (recommendations) and regular communication in MANET. Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack: An attempt of keeping an access to computer resources (nodes) unavailable, especially by generating dummy traffic from one source (DoS) or a large number of sources (distributed DoS [DDoS]).
MANET: Mobile ad hoc network is a self-configuring network of freely moving nodes connected by wireless links that can constitute a path joining two arbitrary nodes of the network.
Anonymous Authentication: A method of proving that someone has rights to certain actions or resources without disclosing the user’s real identity.
Trust: A subjective probability of a one peer (trustee) so that particular actions of another peer (trusted) they are willing and capable to perform will be done according to trustee’s expectations in the given context and time
Sybil Attack: When one adversary node uses several identities to multiply its ability of rating other nodes in MANET.
Reputation: Perceived grade of trustworthiness to a particular peer created by their historical behaviour during observations and interactions with third party peers in the given context and time
Collusion Attack: If a number of adversary nodes make a coalition against reputation of other nodes.
Anonymity: Aims at hiding an entity’s identity completely.
VANET: A form of mobile ad hoc network, to provide communications among nearby vehicles and between vehicles and nearby fixed equipment, usually described as roadside equipment.