Minimal trusted computing base for MANET nodes

Securing any MANET routing protocol requires measures to ensure that routing information advertised by a node (to its neighbors) is consistent with routing information assimilated by a node (from its neighbors). We investigate a minimal trusted computing base (TCB) for MANET nodes to ensure this requirement. We outline low complexity TCB functions which can be executed inside trustworthy boundaries of resource limited trustworthy MANET modules (TMM). The TCB functions are used to maintain a table of active neighbors, create routing records (RR), authenticate RRs to TMMs in neighboring nodes, receive authenticated RRs, and update RRs, subject to simple rules. Even while the dynamic RR database of every node is stored outside the TMM, by storing the root of an index ordered Merkle hash tree (IOMT) the TMMs can ensure that nodes cannot modify, replay or even hide RRs.