A Security Architecture for Tactical Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is self-organizing, infrastructureless, multi-hop network. The wireless and distributed nature of MANETs and the very bad security environment in battlefield bring a great challenge to securing tactical mobile ad hoc networks. Most schemes proposed recently focus on specific security areas, such as establishing trust infrastructure, securing routing protocols, or intrusion detection and response. Few of the previous work proposes security solutions from a system architectural view. In this paper, we propose security architecture for tactical mobile ad hoc networks, which is layered as network model, trust model and security operations. Three main security technologies applied in this architecture and relationships among them are analyzed in detail.