Cheating Resistance of a Secure Incentive Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The idea of rewarding good behaviour instead of penalizing bad or selfish nodes is the underlying concept behind the design of protocols to encourage intermediary nodes in multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks to forward packets from source to destination. We investigate the security of such a secure incentive protocol and show that contrary to its design objective, the protocol allows adversaries to cheat honest parties and furthermore falls to an attack on its entity authentication and key establishment. We analyze the design choices to explore why the protocol exhibits these limitations.