ECC: Elliptic Curve Cryptography-based Watchdog for Detecting Malicious Nodes

Abstract

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) assume that mobile nodes voluntary cooperate in order to
work properly. This cooperation is a cost-intensive activity and some nodes can refuse to cooperate, leading to
a node behaviour. Thus, the overall network performance could be seriously affected. Many message
authentication schemes have been developed, based on either symmetric-key cryptosystems or public-key
cryptosystems. Most of them, however, have the limitations of high computational and communication
overhead in addition to lack of scalability and resilience to node compromise attacks. To address these issues, a
polynomial-based scheme was recently introduced. However, this scheme and its extensions all have the
weakness of a built-in threshold determined by the degree of the polynomial. In this paper, we propose a
scalable authentication scheme based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). While enabling intermediate
nodes authentication, our proposed scheme allows any node to transmit an unlimited number of messages
without suffering the threshold problem. In addition, our scheme can also provide message source privacy.