Lightweight Message Authentication Protocol for Mobile Multihop Relay Networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a lightweight self-organized efficient authentication and key management scheme (SEAKS) to countermeasure the MAC layer attacks such as denial of service (DoS), replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack and the interleaving attacks in mobile multihop relay (MMR) networks. SEAKS has been developed based on privacy key management (PKM) protocol for both unilateral authentication defined as SEAKS-PKMv1 and mutual authentication as SEAKS-PKMv2. In SEAKS, the non-transparent relays (N-RS) perform authentication and establish the authorization key (AK) using our proposed public key cryptosystem based on hash authentication code scheme. The subsequent N-RS can be authenticated with less overhead thus enhancing the scalability of the system. The performance of SEAKS-PKMv1 and SEAKS-PKMv2 protocol has been evaluated using BAN LOGIC to verify the integrity of the participating N-RSs and SSs. Simulation study shows that SEAKS exhibits higher packet delivery ratio by 22%, lesser packet overhead by 12%, and less processing time by 14% as compared to the official draft scheme (OD-2009) for MMR WiMAX networks. SEAKS can be applied to any multihop networks with minimum authentication overhead.