Towards a secure fair MAC in wireless ad hoc networks using trusted computing technology

There are many protocols for MAC-layer rate control and scheduling of wireless ad hoc networks. Yet, network nodes are often compromised, and thus cannot trust one another to be running a given protocol correctly. This paper proposes a secure protocol for fair rate allocation and rate-stable scheduling at the MAC layer for wireless ad hoc networks. We assume the physical hardware is secure, and design our protocol to be secure against software attacks, i.e., hacking. Software vulnerabilities are divided into three parts: (1) the inputs to the program; (2) the program itself; (3) the output of the program. Our proposed secure fair MAC protocol leverages trusted computing technology. A typical (insecure) fair MAC protocol is first described, and simulations show that our proposed secure fair MAC protocol achieves comparable performance even while under attack.