Limitations of on demand secure routing protocols

Routing in mobile ad hoc networks is an open and active area of research. Recently, many have attempted to add value to routing protocols by improving efficiency and security of these protocols. In this paper, we show that a whole class of routing protocols for dynamic networks is vulnerable to a subtle attack. We illustrate this attack on several well known protocols and describe the fundamental properties of this attack and of the protocols that are vulnerable to it. We also propose potential approaches to overcoming the vulnerability that we address.