SPREAD: Secure protocol for reliable data delivery.

摘要

Security is a critical issue in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). The current research and development in this area is still in its infancy. In this dissertation, we proposed and investigated a novel scheme, Secure Protocol for REliable dAta Delivery (SPREAD), to improve network security by enhancing the data confidentiality service in a MANET. The proposed SPREAD scheme aims to provide further protection to keep secret messages from being compromised (or eavesdropped) when they are delivered across insecure networks. The basic idea is to transform a secret message into multiple shares by secret sharing schemes; and then deliver the shares via multiple paths to the destination, so that even if a small number of the nodes used to relay messages are compromised, the secret message as a whole is not compromised.; This dissertation focuses mainly on developing SPREAD in a MANET environment. We presented the overall system architecture and investigated three major design issues. We first described how to obtain message shares using the secret sharing schemes. Then we studied the appropriate choice of secret sharing schemes and the optimal allocation of message shares onto each path so that the security can be maximized. Results show that SPREAD is more secure and also provides a certain degree of reliability because of the redundancy introduced without compromising the security. Third, we discussed the routing and multiple path routing techniques in a MANET; and developed a path set optimization algorithm to find the multiple paths with the desired properties (i.e., as many as possible independent paths and at the same time as secure as possible). Simulation results justify the feasibility of the SPREAD approach and show the effectiveness and other performance metrics.; The major difference between developing SPREAD in a MANET and in a wired network lies on the routing protocols. In the last part of this dissertation, we expand the SPREAD idea into wired networks (the Internet) by presenting a multipath routing protocol which is suitable to wired networks.