Provisioning secure on-demand routing protocol in mobile ad hoc network

Mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) has been a leading technology for ubiquitous networking since a decade, in which an ad-hoc routing is one of its fundamental components. Due to a number of inevitable challenges in MANETs, especially a problem of secure routing is long-standing, many researchers have extensively studied and developed various techniques to secure on-demand routing protocols in MANETs. However, many open issues remain in secure on-demand routing for MANETs. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and efficient security mechanism for on-demand source routing protocol including DSR in MANETs. The proposed scheme provides key generation by using a self-certified public keying technique as well as ensures secure route discovery by employing Schnorr digital signature and multi-signatures scheme. We provide security analysis of the proposed scheme. It can be seen that the proposed approach is more secure than the existing schemes. We also evaluated the proposed approach using computer simulation and compared its performance to that of SRP. The results show that the proposed mechanism is better than SRP.