Biometric‐based user authentication in mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Abstract As the front line of defense, user authentication is crucial for integrity and confidentiality. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) impose a number of non‐trivial challenges to user authentication such as lack of central coordination and limited resources. In high security MANETs, continuous authentication is desirable so that a system can be monitored for the duration of the session to reduce the vulnerability. Biometrics provides some possible solutions to the authentication problem in MANETs, since it has direct connection with user identity. In this paper, we introduce some biometric technologies and their applications in the authentication problem. Multimodal biometrics can be used to exploit the benefits of one biometric while mitigating the inaccuracies of another. We propose an optimal multimodal biometric‐based continuous authentication scheme in MANETs. Some numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.