A New Dawn for the Dark Knight: Securing BATMAN

Abstract

The Better Approach To Mobile Ad-hoc Networking (BATMAN) protocol is designed as an alternative to ad-hoc network routing protocols such as OLSR. Like most such proposals, BATMAN does not provide any security mechanisms that could limit participation in a specific ad-hoc network. In this article we provide a brief overview of previous work on ad-hoc network security, identify shortcomings in these solutions, and subsequently describe our BatCave security extensions to BATMAN. The BatCave extensions control network participation and prevent unauthorized nodes from influencing network routing. We discuss our prototype implementation and ns-3 simulation results, and suggest options for further work.