NETCOM Research Group

Mobile networks allow accessing and sharing information everywhere, but current infrastructures are limited by their legacies from circuit-switched networks. Although mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) solve many of these shortcomings, they face important challenges regarding routing and security. Localized geographic forwarding schemes are very promising for handling the routing challenge even in large multihop wireless networks, since they enable nodes to take routing decisions based only on information about their neighbors. However, these algorithms still lack reliable security. Therefore, this talk will focus on a specific localized geographic routing algorithm, namely face routing, and analyze its vulnerabilities. Face routing offers a new approach to packet forwarding, since the algorithm works at a higher level of abstraction than traditional routing schemes. Security mechanisms can take advantage of this in order to solve the vulnerabilities specific to face routing as well as general weak points of routing in MANETs. Furthermore, this abstraction allows a novel approach to security based on local traffic statistics, which provides enhanced capabilities for detecting attacks in the network. This talk will describe in detail this approach based on statistics and evaluate its performance. Then, the benefits and drawbacks of the mechanism will be presented, as well as suggestions for possible future work which could further enhance its performance.

The conference will be conducted in English