Authenticated On-Demand Ad Hoc Routing Protocol without Pre-shared Key Distribution

Ad hoc routing is a very fundamental operation on an ad hoc network, and hence it has been a main target for an attacker to disrupt an ad hoc network. Therefore, not only secure communication among nodes but also exchanging some special messages for the purpose of security operations, such as key exchange in ad hoc networks, cannot help relying on the secure routing protocol. In this paper, we propose an authenticated on-demand ad hoc routing protocol integrated with a key establishment protocol without pre-shared secret key distribution among ad hoc nodes. The main advantage of the proposed protocol is that establishing a route and a session key between a source and a destination node, when it is needed, can be performed simultaneously in authenticated manner through the routing discovery protocol with no beforehand shared secret key. To achieve our goal, we apply the notion of ID-based statically keyed authenticator to Dynamic Source Routing protocol, so the proposed protocol does not require a public key certificate as well as pre-shared secret key distribution.