A Secure Hybrid Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs)

MANETs and their secure routing are important for different essential applications namely in disaster management, IoT (Internet of Things) designs, commercial areas, military communications/operations etc. This paper provides a secure hybrid routing protocol that uses proactive and reactive techniques for establishment of routes, where MANET topology and MST (minimum spanning tree) are proactively developed and the routes for data transmission are established reactively using MST obtained in proactive phase. For security, our protocol requires digital certificates for authenticity of MANET nodes, where it is assumed that each node prior to joining MANET must collect digital certificate from a certificate authority (CA) (by some out of bound mechanisms). In addition, a security association (SA) between a source-destination pair is established along with the reactive route setup for sending data in MANET confidentially, where SA means to negotiate an authentic secret key between them. For this, either a secure 2-party Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol or Shamir's (2, 2) threshold secret sharing scheme may be used. The proposed hybrid routing protocol, due to use of existing digital certificate and other cryptographic techniques, is secure and efficient. On performance analysis, it is found that most of the operations used have similar cost as in other existing methods, however the processing overheads for the formations of MANET topology and MST convert into a more reliable MANET and support for steadfast data communication.