MSR: a novel MPLS-like Secure Routing protocol for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Protecting sensitive routing information is very fundamental and critical in mobile ad hoc networks(MANETs)that operates in hostile environments, which also bring great challenges. Recent research have been focus on secure routing, however, most of them relies on cryptographic infrastructure, and which greatly limits their usage. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose MSR, a novel MPLS-like Secure Routing protocol for MANETs, Motivated by the MPLS techniques, MSR integrates the key agreement that doesn't need the support of online trusted third party and label switching techniques into the secure routing and forwarding process. By establishing multiple label switching paths within the key agreement process, MSR is resistant to traffic analysis attack, and provides the desirable identity and relationship anonymity through multiple pseudonyms and local label negotiation. We then implement MSR in Glomosim and conduct extensive experiments. The detailed analysis and simulation results show that MSR protocol is very efficient and brings low overhead to the network.