Hash Chains to Secure Proactive Protocols

Several secure extensions have been proposed to deal with the OLSR proactive routing protocol security, but they often involve a very high resource consumption that degrades network performances. The protocol ADVSIG is one of these extensions. It presents an efficient security approach, but generates very high computational costs due to the cryptographic operations it performs on the control messages. In this paper, we present a secure mechanism for OLSR, based on ADVSIG protocol, that we call ADVHCA. Its, purpose is to improve ADVSIG performances using hash chains to reduce the cost of securing HELLO control messages. A watching mechanism is also proposed to counter the wormhole attack. The whole solution is simulated and analyzed using NS2.