Designing Reliable and Secure Tactical MANET's
In Response to: ONR BAA 06-028
FY07 MURI Topic #26: Robust and Resilient Tactical MANET's
The goal of our collaborative effort is to develop and implement practical techniques that integrate
MANET reliability and security for tactical operations to achieve superior performance characteristics in
the face of both failures and deliberate adversary attacks. Our hypothesis is that it is practically
impossible to disassociate reliable and secure operations in tactical environments. A tactical MANET
cannot operate reliably in the presence of an adversary whose actions disrupt communications and are
not countered by detection/recovery, prevention, avoidance, or resilience techniques. Conversely, an
unreliable MANET, whose communications are not robust and resilient, cannot be deemed to be secure
as the network may enter states in which the adversary can take advantage of communication
fragility; e.g., capture temporary disconnected nodes in an undetected manner.
Our research is based on the fundamental principles of active protocol monitoring for both
performance, stability and adversary handling, of employing communication channel diversity for
robust end-to-end operation in the face of failures and deliberate attacks, and of exploiting cross-layer
interaction for predicting the effects of performance changes caused by layer-specific failures and
attacks on end-to-end MANET operation. We employ design and analysis techniques found in network
theory, statistics, game theory, cryptography, economics and sociology, and system theory to
develop, design and analyze models, tools, and mathematical representations for predicting
performance and prescribing resilient, secure MANETs.
We anticipate that our research will lead to systematic ways of evaluating and countering attack
vulnerabilities of MANETs and wireless sensor networks. The research will also lead to provably robust
and resilient design of MANETs, which is a major shortcoming in the current state of the art. We also
anticipate that the research will lead to the development of efficient security schemes for multi-service
MANETs with guaranteed performance.