Secure Neighborhood Routing Protocol

The success of mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) in many applications demands adequate security measures for the routing protocols. The MANET environment offers unique challenges to making routing secure without introducing onerous computational or operational requirements. In this paper, we introduce the secure neighborhood routing protocol (SNRP), which offers detection of several malicious behaviors and robustness under various routing attacks. SNRP introduces an authenticated form of the neighbor lookup protocol (NLP) to secure MANET routing with significantly less cryptographic computation than approaches such as secure ad-hoc on-demand distance vector (SAODV) routing. Public key certificates are used to "introduce" a newly arrived node to its new neighbors, after which neighbors trust (but observe) each other. Route discovery packets are then secured using end-to-end HMAC rather than hop-by-hop signatures