A Scalable Wireless Routing Protocol Secure against Route Truncation Attacks

Abstract

Abstract. Wireless routing protocols allow transmitting nodes to have some knowledge of the topology in order to decide when to forward a packet (via broadcast) and when to drop it. Since a routing protocol forms the backbone of any network, it is a lucrative target for attacks. Routing protocols for wired networks (such as S-BGP) are not scalable in an ad-hoc wireless environment because of two main drawbacks: (1) the need to maintain knowledge about all immediate neighbors (which requires a discovery protocol), and (2) the need to transmit the same update several times, one for each neighbor. Although information about neighbors is readily available in a fairly static and wired network, such information is often not updated or available in an ad-hoc wireless network with mobile devices. Consequently, S-BGP is not suitable for such scenarios. We propose a BGP-type wireless routing protocol for such networks that does not suffer from such drawbacks. The protocol uses a novel authentication primitive called Enhanced Chain Signatures (ECS).