Efficient and secure indirect-address service discovery in MANET

Service discovery protocols address the problem of preliminary association or storage of services at specific service providers and, at a later stage, efficient lookup for providers responsible for demanded client's services. In mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) used for military applications, both the efficiency of service discovery protocols and the security of such protocols against adversaries are of crucial importance for the success of, say, battlefield operations. In this paper we consider a recently proposed lookup protocol that satisfies interesting efficiency properties by using an approach reminiscent of indirect-address storage techniques, and thus significantly different from other well-known flooding-type approaches. We observe that this protocol can be adapted to obtain a service discovery protocol in MANET. Specifically, we build an index system that matches services to their correspondent service agents; then servers register themselves to selected agents, and clients can efficiently retrieve the service information from the specific service agents. We then investigate the problem of securing the proposed protocol against Byzantine adversaries. Our main result is the design and analysis of a both efficient and secure service discovery and analysis of a both protocol based on indirect-address techniques.