Secure Neighbor Discovery in Wireless Networks

Wireless ad-hoc networks, especially sensor networks, are increasingly being used for data monitoring in commercial, industrial, and military applications. Security is of great concern from many different viewpoints: ensuring that sensitive data does not fall into wrong hands; ensuring that the received data has not been doctored; and ensuring that the network is resilient to denial of service attacks. This book studies the fundamental problem of secure neighbor discovery, which is critical to protecting the network against a number of different forms of attacks. In wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks, neighbor discovery is one of the first steps performed by a node upon deployment and disrupting it adversely affects a number of routing, MAC, topology discovery and intrusion detection protocols. It is especially harmful when an adversary can convince nodes that it is a legitimate neighbor, which it can do easily and without the use of cryptographic primitives. This book discusses a secure neighbor discovery protocol, SEDINE, for static multihop wireless networks, and extensively analyze its performance.