Security in Pervasive Computing

Abstract

Pervasive computing has wide application in military, medical and smart home domain. In pervasive computing, a large number of smart objects interact with one another without the user intervention. Although the technology is promising but security needs to be addressed before the technology is widely deployed. Pervasive networks are formed spontaneously and the devices communicate via radio. Thus, mobile ad hoc networking is an essential technology for pervasive computing. An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes, which acts as a host as well as a router. The communication between the nodes is multihop without any centralized administration. AODV (Ad Hoc On demand Distance Vector) is a prominent on-demand reactive routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. But in existing AODV, there is no security provision against well-known attack known as “Black hole attack”. Black hole nodes are those malicious nodes that agree to forward the packets to destination but do not forward the packets intentionally. Thischapter extends the watchdog mechanism for the AODV routing protocol to detect such misbehavior based on promiscuous listening. The proposed method first detects a black hole node and then gives a new route bypassing this node. The experimental results show that in a lightly loaded, hostile environment, the proposed scheme improves the throughput compared to an unprotected AODV protocol.