A new cluster-based secure communication scheme for mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc networks have attracted considerable interest because of their use by the military and emergency rescue personnel as well as in mining operations and vehicular networks. However, mobile ad hoc networks are more vulnerable to security attacks than other types of wireless networks, such as wireless local area network or 3G/LTE networks. As a countermeasure to attack, clustering is used, where each node must be authenticated with the corresponding clusterhead in the cluster, and all data must be encrypted. In this paper, a new cluster-based secure communication scheme is proposed in which mutual authentications are performed before data transmission. In contrast to conventional schemes that use public key infrastructure cryptosystems, resulting in serious overheads in terms of computation and communication, our authentication process uses a station-to-station protocol, which is in itself an extended version of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol to establish authenticated context. Moreover, attacks like replay attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks can be prevented by additional security mechanisms in the authentication and communication processes such as hash-function message authentication codes. Our proposed scheme not only meets all the security requirements, but also supports efficient communication. Performance analysis demonstrates the superiority of our scheme to related schemes.