HEAP: A packet authentication scheme for
mobile ad hoc networks
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Rehan Akbani, Turgay Korkmaz
*
, G.V.S. Raju
University of Texas at San Antonio, 6900 North Loop 1604 West, San Antonio, TX 78249, United States
Received 5 May 2007; received in revised form 28 September 2007; accepted 6 November 2007
Available online 17 November 2007
Abstract
In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs), it is easy to launch various sophisticated
attacks such as wormhole, man-in-the-middle and denial of service (DoS), or to impersonate another node. To combat
such attacks from outsider nodes, we study packet authentication in wireless networks and propose a hop-by-hop, efficient
authentication protocol, called HEAP. HEAP authenticates packets at every hop by using a modified HMAC-based
algorithm along with two keys and drops any packets that originate from outsiders. HEAP can be used with multicast,
unicast or broadcast applications. We ran several simulations to compare HEAP with existing authentication schemes,
such as TESLA, LHAP and Lu and Pooch’s algorithm. We measured metrics such as latency, throughput, packet delivery
ratio, CPU and memory utilization and show that HEAP performs very well compared to other schemes while guarding
against outsider attacks.
Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: NMAC; HMAC; Hop-by-hop packet authentication; MANET security
1. Introduction
Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have been
receiving significant attention from research com-
munity and industry due to their potential use in
several domains. For example, MANETs can be
used in a military setting where troops can exchange
strategic information on the move. The ability to
cope with high mobility and the lack of fixed infra-
structure make MANETs very attractive for mili-
tary and tactical applications. Another useful
application for MANETs is mobile conferencing
for business meetings and seminars involving a large
group of people, where access points may be absent
or inaccessible. It is also very useful for people
doing fieldwork such as geologists, cartographers
or archaeologists who may want to communicate
with their colleagues on the field. In emergencies
and disaster struck areas, MANETs can be rapidly
deployed to allow firefighters, paramedics and
1570-8705/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.adhoc.2007.11.002
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An abridged version of this paper was appeared in ACM 10th
Communications and Networking Simulation Symposium CNS
07, pp. 157–165, March 25–29, 2007, Norfolk, VA, USA.
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This work is partially supported by the National Science
Foundation under CRI 0551501 and CIAS at the University of
Texas at San Antonio through a grant provided by the US Air
Force.
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: rakbani@cs.utsa.edu (R. Akbani), korkmaz@
cs.utsa.edu (T. Korkmaz), raju@utsa.edu (G.V.S. Raju).
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Ad Hoc Networks 6 (2008) 1134–1150
www.elsevier.com/locate/adhoc