APPLYING PUZZLE ENCRYPTION IN THE ON-DEMAND ROUTING PROTOCOLS IN MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS (MANETS)

Recently, the use of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) systems in our life has rapidly increased. Nevertheless, we need for this efficiency and privacy routing protocols to exchange the information between the nodes in this kind of networks. We propose a new scheme to apply it on the On-Demand routing because it is one of the most popular and usable in the MANETs. The main goal in our paper is to promote and improve the authentication between the nodes in the MANETs by applying the puzzle encryption before they start exchange the data packet between them. The new scheme is based on combined use of cryptographic puzzles and weakly secret bit commitment (WSBC) function. The scheme has to offer privacy protection of the confidential information stored in the nodes, that is identifier ID and encryption puzzle. The identifier allows the unequivocal identification of the nodes on the mobile networks. The anonymity of messages is crucial to avoid traceability and replay attacks and denial services. The puzzles function use one way encryption functions whereas the keys must be enough to avoid a brute force attack. We use also the bit commitment function with puzzle encryption in our scheme to commit a value without revealing that value. This scheme will offer moderate protection concerning privacy and traceability when a node communicates with each other in the Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs).