Event

An Adaptive and Lightweight Protocol for Hop-by-Hop Authentication

Tobias Heer

RWTH Aachen University

Tuesday, March 24, 2009
2:30 p.m.

Wireless multi-hop networks are particularly susceptible to attacks based on flooding and the interception, tampering with, and forging of packets. Thus, reliable communication in such networks quintessentially depends on mechanisms to verify the authenticity of network traffic and the identity of communicating peers. A major challenge to achieve this functionality are the tight resource constraints of such devices as smartphones, mesh- and sensor nodes with regard to CPU, memory, and energy. Since existing approaches for traffic authentication such as symmetric and asymmetric cryptography or hash-chain-based signatures suffer from significant drawbacks related to functionality and efficiency, we present ALPHA, an Adaptive and Lightweight Protocol for Hop-by-hop Authentication. ALPHA establishes a verifiable notion of identity for network traffic, based on computationally cheap hash functions, enabling end-to-end as well as hop-by-hop integrity protection for unicast traffic.

Bio:
Short CV is available at http://ds.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/members/heer