An end-to-end solution for secure and survivable routing in MANETs

We present a new approach to secure routing in MANETs and argue that the same approach can lead to more reliable routing in the face of node and link failure. Prior solutions to security in networks is inapplicable to routing in MANETs because of node mobility and the relative scarcity of bandwidth. Furthermore, path discovery does not necessarily translate into data delivery. We argue that secure routing in MANETs must be based on the end-to-end verification of physical-path characteristics aided by the exploitation of path diversity to find secure paths. We apply this approach to the design of the secure routing through diversity and verification (SRDV) protocol, a secure routing protocol that we show to be as efficient as unsecured on-demand or proactive routing approaches in the absence of attacks and capable of defending against a variety of attacks. Redundancy, through diversity, not only can be used to provide security, but it is also crucial to the survivability of the network thus establishing an insightful link between security and survivability of the network.