Light Weight Cryptographic Address Generation Using System State Entropy Gathering for IPv6 Based MANETs

Abstract: In IPv6 based MANETs, the neighbor discovery enables nodes to self-configure and communicate with neighbor nodes through autoconfiguration. The Stateless address autoconfiguration (SLAAC) has proven to face several security issues. Even though the Secure Neighbor Discovery (SeND) uses Cryptographically Generated Addresses (CGA) to address these issues, it creates other concerns such as need for CA to authenticate hosts, exposure to CPU exhaustion attacks and high computational intensity. These issues are major concern for MANETs as it possesses limited bandwidth and processing power. The paper proposes empirically strong Light Weight Cryptographic Address Generation (LW-CGA) using entropy gathered from system states. Even the system users cannot monitor these system states; hence LW-CGA provides high security with minimal computational complexity and proves to be more suitable for MANETs. The LW-CGA and SeND are implemented and tested to study the performances. The evaluation shows that LW-CGA with good runtime throughput takes minimal address generation latency.