A Secure Routing Protocol in Proactive Security Approach for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Secure routing of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) is still a hard problem after years of research. We therefore propose to design a secure routing protocol in a new approach. This protocol starts from a prerequisite secure status and fortifies this status by protecting packets using identity-based cryptography and updating cryptographic keys using threshold cryptography periodically or when necessary. Compared to existing schemes, the main contribution of our proposal is the notion of allowing only legitimate nodes to participate in the bootstrapping process, rather than trying to detect adversary nodes after they are participating in the routing protocol. Besides, the proposal has several improvements in routing setup and maintenance: it does not need any side channel or secret channel; it simplifies secret updates without requiring a node to move around; it does not use flooding to set up initial routing, and does not use multicast to update secrets.