Routing Security in Open/ Dynamic Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Current technologies and security advances have made networked systems and applications very popular and widely used. The pervasive and practical aspects of wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) made them very popular as well. This created the need for securing MANETs to provide users with authentic communications, secure and robust information exchange, and efficient security mechanisms. However, many of the security solutions devised for regular networks are not as efficient nor as effective on MANETs. This paper investigates the security issues of a common type of MANETs (open/dynamic MANET) at the network layer where routing protocols and forwarding mechanisms are used. In this paper, we identify the different security requirements specific to MANETs and survey some of the available secure routing techniques. The study has revealed some problems with the current routing protocols and identified the most important issue that needs to be resolved to ensure a secure network layer.