Secure zone based routing protocol for mobile adhoc networks

An ad hoc network is the cooperative engagement of a collection of mobile nodes without the required intervention of any centralized access point or existing infrastructure. Ad hoc networking for commercial uses; however, the main applications lie in military, tactical and other security-sensitive operations. In these applications, secure routing is an important issue. Most of the protocols proposed for Secure Routing are either proactive or reactive in approach. In this paper, a secure hybrid ad hoc routing protocol, called Secure Zone Routing Protocol (SZRP), which aims at addressing the limitations by combining the best properties of both proactive and reactive approaches. The proposed protocol is based on the concept zone routing protocol (ZRP). Which employs an integrated approach of digital signature and both the symmetric and asymmetric key encryption techniques to achieve the security goals like message integrity, data confidentiality and end to end authentication at IP layer. The paper details the design of the proposed protocol and analyses its robustness in the presence of multiple possible security attacks that involves impersonation, modification, fabrication and replay of packets.