ADSR: Authenticated DSR

MANETs have two characteristics that make traditional routing protocols cannot be applied in a straightforward manner to achieve their objectives: firstly, the lack of a default infrastructure; secondly, the variability of this infrastructure once the nodes forming the network move themselves and vary their relative position to the other nodes. Owing to this, specific routing protocols are developed for MANETs. Bearing in mind that the characteristics of these networks limit the available resources (power consumption, bandwidth), incorporating security to routing protocols in an optimal way is not easy. In this paper we present a secure routing protocol based on DSR that employs elliptic curve cryptography to sign the route discovery packets. It also uses the aggregate signature scheme which allows us to compact M signatures of M different messages, even if the signatures are from M different signers, in one single signature.