Secure and wireless multimedia data exchange in ad hoc group

Abstract

In the past several years, the growth of Internet and web technology has benefit a lot of enterprises and people to have a more convince and low cost communication media. In tradition, communicating in the Internet must have a wired machine with network infrastructure. But, nowadays, with the rapid development of wireless technology and mobile devices, connecting to Internet can be done by mobile devices wirelessly. Since the convenience and popularity of wireless network, more commercial transaction and personal exchange involving privacy would carry out via such network, so the integrity and security of messages and files exchanges between client and sever or peer-to-peer is become more and more significant. Among several network protocols, ad hoc network are more and more popular since it can be deployed rapidly with relatively low cost and the popularity of mobile devices. Unlike traditional network, ad-hoc network do not rely on any fixed infrastructure, lack of infrastructure introduces problems in routing, name resolution, authentication and service discovery, hosts rely on each other to keep the network connection and those hosts far apart rely on other nodes to relay messages as routers. Moreover, wireless network is more vulnerable to security attacks. Frequent changes in network topology also tamper the detection of adversary. So, security is a big issue in wireless ad-hoc network. In order to solve the security problem, authentication and data encryption should be employed. The authentication can verify who you are talking to, make sure you send information to authorized party only. And the encryption would protect your information so that adversary cannot understand your information even though he got your data. By doing that, messages and files exchange can be carried out over an insecure channel securely.