HEAP: A packet authentication scheme for mobile ad hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs), it is easy to launch various sophisticated attacks such as wormhole, man-in-the-middle and denial of service (DoS), or to impersonate another node. To combat such attacks from outsider nodes, we study packet authentication in wireless networks and propose a hop-by-hop, efficient authentication protocol, called HEAP. HEAP authenticates packets at every hop by using a modified HMAC-based algorithm along with two keys and drops any packets that originate from outsiders. HEAP can be used with multicast, unicast or broadcast applications. We ran several simulations to compare HEAP with existing authentication schemes, such as TESLA, LHAP and Lu and Pooch’s algorithm. We measured metrics such as latency, throughput, packet delivery ratio, CPU and memory utilization and show that HEAP performs very well compared to other schemes while guarding against outsider attacks.