SECURITY DEPLOYMENT IN MOBILE ADHOC NETWORKS

This paper is concerned with security in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). MANETs have unique characteristics and constraints that make traditional approaches to security inadequate. In particular, it is not appropriate to assume preexisting shared secret keys or authentication among members. The lack of an infrastructure exacerbates the situation. Therefore the issues of authentication, key distribution, and intrusion detection require different methods, which are discussed in this paper. Traditional authentication, key distribution, and intrusion detection methods are often too inefficient to be used in resource-constrained devices in MANETs. We propose to combine efficient techniques from elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and a distributed intrusion-detection system (IDS) based on threshold cryptography. We also propose to use a distributed certifying authority (CA) along with per packet and per-hop authentication for addressing the issues mentioned above. The model assumes that no single node can be trusted and relies instead on a distributed trust model