Security and trust in mobile ad hoc networks

Many routing protocols have been proposed by researchers for possible practical implementation of a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) in military, government and commercial environments. We also have reactive and proactive routing protocols. In most of these routing protocols, security is built on top of the protocol. In many cases, this turn out not to be the best approach in terms of being fully secured. Therefore, we propose a new security feature that will be designed from the ground up considering the routing concepts with the security and trust integrated. We call this new protocol model "trust-aware routing protocol (TARP)." TARP focuses more on the trusted availability and quality of trust as important factors in securing ad hoc networks. In this talk, we review the current ad-hoc routing protocols and investigate their security features. Then, we discuss the details of the new proposed protocol, TARP, and show how we believe that it will resolve some the current security problems that ad-hoc networks are facing today