Multihop Distance-Bounding for Improving Security and Efficiency of Ad-Hoc Networks

Distance bounding (DB) protocols are crucial solutions against "distance attacks?' Traditional one-hop DB protocols can estimate an upper-bound of the physical distance between two nodes within their communication range, but they fail when this distance exceeds their coverage. Recently, a two-hop DB protocol to verify the proximity of nodes beyond the first hop was proposed. Nonetheless, this approach is still lacking for meeting security requirements of multihop communication scenarios like ad-hoc wireless network. Motivated by this situation and considering security problems of a relay communication scenario, in this paper, we propose a multihop DB protocol, where a node can detect multihop neighbors and verify legality beyond its communication range. First, we present a description of traditional one-hop DB protocols and provide a general model for easily extending them to multihop capabilities. Then, we analyze one-hop and multihop models security giving theoretical and simulated attack success probabilities for different cases, and showing that the proposed solution can better prevent distance attacks.