A Secure Wireless Routing Protocol Using Enhanced Chain Signatures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a secure wireless routing protocol called SS-BGP that uses Enhanced Chain Signatures to enable efficient, broadcast-based routing updates in ad-hoc wireless networks, addressing scalability and security issues.

Contribution

It presents a novel routing protocol for wireless networks that employs Enhanced Chain Signatures for secure, scalable broadcast updates without neighbor knowledge.

Findings

Enables single broadcast routing updates in wireless networks.

Provides security against routing table attacks.

Reduces overhead compared to traditional protocols.

Abstract

We propose a routing protocol for wireless networks. Wireless routing protocols allow hosts within a network to have some knowledge of the topology in order to know when to forward a packet (via broadcast) and when to drop it. Since a routing protocol forms the backbone of a network, it is a lucrative target for many attacks, all of which attempt to disrupt network traffic by corrupting routing tables of neighboring routers using false updates. Secure routing protocols designed for wired networks (such as S-BGP) are not scalable in an ad-hoc wireless environment because of two main drawbacks: (1) the need to maintain knowledge about all immediate neighbors (which requires a discovery protocol), and (2) the need to transmit the same update several times, one for each neighbor. Although information about neighbors is readily available in a fairly static and wired network, such information is often not updated or available in an ad-hoc wireless network with mobile devices. Our protocol is a variant of S-BGP called SS-BGP and allows a single broadcast for routing updates without having the need to be aware of every neighboring router. The protocol is based on a novel authentication primitive called Enhanced Chain Signatures (ECS).