Mitigation of Non-Transparent Rouge Relay Stations in Mobile Multihop Relay Networks

Deployment of relays to enhance the coverage area and the throughput is the hot research topic in contemporary era. These relays may act as amplify or forward (transparent relays) or decode and forward (non-transparent relay). Unlike transparent relays, a non-transparent relay (N-RS) is an intelligent device, which can act as a base station for the multihop relays on behalf of multihop relay base stations (MR-BS). However, insertion of such intelligent N-RS demand modified and enhanced security measures, as adversaries may act as a rogue N-RS which may create a significant disruption with little effort to threaten the wide spread deployment. The rouge N-RS may inject the typical Mac layer attacks, i.e., denial of service attacks (DoS), replay attacks or man in the middle attacks (MiTM). Secondly, every participating multihop N-RS need to authenticate itself with MR-BS, which may enhance the authentication overhead on MR-BS. To address these challenges, this paper proposed a secure authentication protocol for distributed hop by hop authentication and localized re-authentication. The proposed authentication protocol utilized the modified version of envelop public key cryptography. Formal BAN logic method and the mathematical model are utilized to validate the authentication protocol and authentication overhead respectively. To the author knowledge, this is the first attempt to counter the rouge N-RS in MMR networks.