Formal security analysis of Ariadne secure routing protocol using model checking

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a self-configuring network of mobile terminals, connected by wireless links. In such environments, delivering communication guarantees has hardly been achieved by any protocol in its entirety. In this work, we model the secure on-demand routing protocol Ariadne, in order to verify one of its powerful security properties by model checking. We use the SPIN model checker to identify a sequence of possible events leading to a new attack, where two compromised nodes collaborate to remove all intermediate nodes from the route discovery process. To the best of our knowledge, the new attack can not be thwarted by any detection and prevention mechanism known to date.