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The Military Aims to Develop 'Smart' & Secure WiFi
Krishna Dagli writes to mention a Network World article about a military project to create a self-configuring, secure wireless network. From the article: "Academic concepts such as artificial intelligence and Tim Berners-Lee's 'Semantic Web,' combined with technologies such as the Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET), cognitive radio, and peer-to-peer networking, would provide the nuts and bolts of such a network. Although the project is intended for soldiers in the field, the resulting advances could trickle down to end users. 'Military networks are going to converge as closely as we can to civil technologies,' says Preston Marshall, the program manager of DARPA's Advanced Technology Office."
Well, when I was a youth I worked on the ARPA Network, a DARPA funded experiment in how networks recover from individual route failures. Well the technology grew up into the Internet. The US government wasn't pleased when they couldn't bomb away Saddam's communications network. It came out later that he used internet technology and that's why his network recovered so well. Now DARPA would like to do the same thing with inexpensive wireless devices. The technology is coming anyway, the genie is almost out of the bottle for good. Wirless networking is a disruptive technology that is inexpensive and flexible, I like it. I had a dream the other night about being a wireless guru and working with the south american rebels in the forest on their wireless network. Very exciting and dangerous. It would make a good movie.
Wireless ad hoc nets have two major points of vulnerability: they are vulnerable to routing protocol attacks, and they consist of nodes with finite energy reserves.
I would disagree with the assertion in the article that current routing protocols are insufficient to handle MANETs. MANET routing protocols are slightly different (most are adaptations of traditional protocols), but if implemented correctly, they can support networks with very high rates of topology change... this has been supported by the literature for years now.
What the protocols are lacking is resistance from spoofing attacks that confound or exploit the "intelligence" of the adaptive routing protocols, and attacks on battery energy that coax nodes to use more energy or target and overwhelm key nodes. This has to be addresses in the lower layers as suggested by the article. So it's no surprise that the trend has been to develop "underlay" meshing protocols instead of traditional layer 3 routing schemes, because all of the security has to be built into layers 1 and 2 anyway on account of the fact that traffic can be easily sniffer or injected by passers by.