Blockchain Cryptographic -based Authentication and Verification for Secure Communication in Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET)

Abstract

One of the most popular wireless network technologies is mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET). A MANET network is a decentralized, self-organizing, and infrastructure-less network. In MANET network there is no any administrative node that controls the entire network, every node participating in the network is responsible for the reliable operation of the network and the activities of the network. Due to the nature of MANET’s network characteristics, the key issues to design the routing protocol are security and network performance. In terms of network performance, AODV has better performance than other MANET routing protocols. However secure routing is an essential part of MANET for protecting the network operations from malicious nodes. To address this secure routing problem in MANET, we proposed a new secure AODV protocol called blockchain-based authentication and verification security mechanism for securing MANET communication. A blockchain security mechanism is used mainly in the financial institution to secure financial transactions. But now a day’s, many business organizations use a Blockchain system for securing their asset and communication. Communication participants in blockchain-based authentication and verification use SHA1 and SHA5 cryptographic techniques used to make a block of the messages. Every node in the network must have the key table to authenticate and verify the neighbor node incoming data. If a node is suspected as an attacker, the security mechanism will isolate it from the network before communication is established and put the node in the rejected list. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated under malicious nodes by using network simulator 2 (NS-2). It is compared with a symmetric key authentication routing protocol. Security performance is evaluated in terms of Detection Rate (DR), False Positive Rate (FPR), and False Negative Rate (FNR), and also we evaluated network performance in term of end to End Delay (E2ED), Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), and throughput (TH). The simulation result of our proposed algorithm shows that the detection rate of the proposed system is 87.76% and the proposed method has better network performance than the symmetric key authentication method in terms of packet delivery ratio and throughput, but in terms of end-to-end delay, there is no improvement. The average packet delivery ratio increases by 7.98%, and the average throughput increases by 4.61%. However, the average end-to-end delay value decreases by 0.031%.