HiMAC: Hierarchical Message Authentication Code for Secure Data Dissemination in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks are wireless self-organized networks in which mobile nodes can connect directly to each other. This fact makes such networks highly susceptible to security risks and threats, as malicious nodes can easily disguise as new trusted nodes and start attacking the network after a certain period of time. Hence, the security of data transmission in MANET has been a hot topic in the past years. Several research works attempted to detect and stop various attacks on MANET nodes and packets. This paper presents an efficient mechanism for secure data dissemination in MANETs. Our approach is based on the identity based cryptography and Message Authentication Code (MAC). The proposed security mechanism prevents malicious nodes from tampering or replaying intermediate packets by means of signing and encrypting the packet at each intermediate trusted node. We tested the efficiency of our system using the ns2 simulator by comparing it to a similar security mechanism. The simulations illustrate that our approach obtains many advantages over other existing approaches for secure data dissemination in MANETs.