Secure Neighbor Discovery as a Service in the Internet of Ships Environment

Ming Xu, Ling Liu

Abstract: Ships as moving vehicles have intermittent connectivity and are connected to one another via ad-hoc networks with directional antennas. We refer to such Internet of Ships as IoSNET. Neighbor discovery (ND) is a fundamental requirement and a building block in an IoSNET. However, existing directional antenna-based ND protocols are known to be vulnerable under multi-end wormhole attacks. By analyzing such vulnerabilities, we propose a Directional Antennas powered SEcure Neighbor Discovery protocol, coined as DASEND , for protecting IoSNET against two-end and multi-end wormhole attacks. The DASEND protocol is novel in two aspects. First, we construct two timing constraints for detecting the wormhole attacks using a linear clock model without strict time synchronization and propose a message authentication mechanism for ensuring the security of the time stamps. Second, we propose a virtual grid structure to model the relative locations of transmitters jointly using their direction-of-arrival (DOA) and received signal strength (RSS) values. Based on this model, we propose a beam state-based steering approach to shorten the discovery latency of the ND process. Extensive experiments through IoSNET simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our DASEND protocol for delivering secure neighbor discovery as a service in the Internet of Ships environment under different movement scenarios.