Title: Formal security analysis of Ariadne secure routing protocol using model checking

Authors: E. Onem; A. Burak Gürdağ; M. Ufuk Çağlayan

Addresses: Department of Computer Engineering, Computer Networks Research Laboratory (NETLAB), Boğaziçi University, Istanbul TR-34342, Turkey. ' Department of Computer Engineering, Computer Networks Research Laboratory (NETLAB), Boğaziçi University, Istanbul TR-34342, Turkey. ' Department of Computer Engineering, Computer Networks Research Laboratory (NETLAB), Boğaziçi University, Istanbul TR-34342, Turkey

Abstract: A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a self-configuring network of mobile terminals, connected by wireless links. In such environments, delivering communication guarantees has hardly been achieved by any protocol in its entirety. In this work, we model the secure on-demand routing protocol Ariadne, in order to verify one of its powerful security properties by model checking. We use the SPIN model checker to identify a sequence of possible events leading to a new attack, where two compromised nodes collaborate to remove all intermediate nodes from the route discovery process. To the best of our knowledge, the new attack can not be thwarted by any detection and prevention mechanism known to date.

Keywords: formal security analysis; model checking; MANETs; mobile ad hoc networks; routing security; Ariadne; SPIN; PROMELA; mobile networks; secure routing protocols; route discovery; attacks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2012.045537

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2012 Vol.9 No.1, pp.12 - 24

Received: 01 Aug 2009
Accepted: 14 May 2010
Published online: 22 Feb 2012 *

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