Secure Prophet Address Allocation for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile node in a MANET must be assigned with a free IP address before it may participate in unicast communications. This is a fundamental and difficult problem in the practical application of any MANET. There have been several solutions proposed, among which prophet address allocation outperforms others in terms of communication overhead, latency, and scalability. However, none of the approaches can survive attacks in an insecure environment. Based on studies of insecure scenarios, attack schemes, and our previous work, a secure autoconfiguration algorithm, namely secure prophet address allocation, is proposed in the paper. The proposed approach is able to maintain uniqueness of address assignment in the presence of IP spoofing attacks, "state pollution" attacks, and Sybil attacks. The invulnerability of the scheme is supported by both theoretical analysis and simulation results.