Address assignment is a key challenge in ad hoc networks due to the lack of infrastructure. Autonomous addressing protocols require a distributed and self-managed mechanism to avoid address collisions in a dynamic network with fading channels, frequent partitions, and joining/leaving nodes. We propose and analyze a lightweight protocol that configures mobile ad hoc nodes based on a distributed address database stored in filters that reduces the control load and makes the proposal robust to packet losses and network partitions. We evaluate the performance of our protocol, considering joining nodes, partition merging events, and network initialization. Simulation results show that our protocol resolves all the address collisions and also reduces the control traffic when compared to previously proposed protocols.

The Bloom filter is a space-efficient data structure often employed in distributed applications to save bandwidth during data exchange. These savings, however, come at the cost of errors in the shared data, which are usually assumed low enough to not disrupt the application. We argue that this assumption does not hold in a more hostile environment, such as the Internet, where attackers can send a carefully crafted Bloom filter in order to break the application. In this paper, we propose the concatenated Bloom filter (CBF), a robust Bloom filter that prevents the attacker from interfering on the shared information, protecting the application data while still providing space efficiency. Instead of using a single large filter, the CBF concatenates small subfilters to improve both the filter robustness and capacity. We propose three CBF variants and provide analytical results that show the efficacy of the CBF for different scenarios. We also evaluate the performance of our filter in an IP traceback application and simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism in the face of attackers.

Anonymity is one of the main motivations for conducting denial-of-service attacks. Currently, there is no mechanism to either identify the true source of an IP packet or to prove its authenticity. In this paper we propose a stateless IP traceback technique that identifies the origin network of each individual packet. We show that the proposed traceback system is the only one that scales with the number of attackers and also satisfies practical requirements, such as no state stored at routers and a header overhead (25 bits) that can be allocated in IPv4 header. The proposed system exploits the customer-provider hierarchy of the Internet at autonomous system (AS) level and introduces the idea of checkpoints, which are the two most important nodes in an AS-level path. Simulation results using a real-world topology trace show that the proposed system narrows the source of an attack packet down to less than two candidate ASes on average. In addition, considering a partial deployment scenario, we show that the proposed system is able to successfully trace more than 90% of the attacks if only 8% of the ASes (i.e., just the core ASes) implement the system. The achieved success rate is quite better than using the classical hop-by-hop path reconstruction.

This paper introduces a self-organized mechanism to control user access in ad hoc networks without requiring any infrastructure or a central administration entity. The proposed mechanism authenticates and monitors nodes with the so-called controller sets, which are resistant to the dynamic network membership. The analysis shows that the proposed scheme is robust even to collusion attacks and provides availability up to 90% better than proposals based on threshold cryptography. The performance improvement arises mostly from the controller sets autonomy to recover after network partitions.

Address autoconfiguration is an important issue for ad hoc networks in order to provide autonomous networking and self-management. The IP address assignment for ad hoc nodes requires a distributed procedure that resolves all the address collisions in a dynamic network with fading channels, frequent partitions, and joining/leaving nodes. We propose a filter-based addressing protocol for autoconfiguration of mobile ad hoc networks that is lightweight and robust to packet losses. We present a probabilistic analysis of address collisions and discuss filters functionalities in the address autoconfiguration. We evaluate the performance of our protocol for static and mobile scenarios, considering joining nodes and partition mergings. Simulation results show that our protocol resolves all the address collisions and reduces up to 22 times the control traffic when compared to the other addressing protocols.

The current Internet architecture allows malicious nodes to disguise their origin during denial-of-service attacks with IP spoofing. A well-known solution to identify these nodes is IP traceback. In this paper, we introduce and analyze a lightweight single-packet IP traceback system that does not store any data in the network core. The proposed system relies on a novel data structure called Generalized Bloom Filter, which is tamper resistant. In addition, an efficient improved path reconstruction procedure is introduced and evaluated. Analytical and simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. The simulations are performed in an Internet-based scenario and the results show that the proposed system locates the real attack path with high accuracy.