Secure Routing for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a kind of wireless network which is formed by mobile nodes communicating with each other through wireless link without having xed infrastructure. Each device in MANET is free to move independently in any direction and change its links to other devices frequency. Securing wireless ad hoc networks is a highly challenging issue. Absence of any central co-ordination mechanism and shared wireless medium makes MANET more vulnerable to digitalcyber-attacks than wired network there are a number of attacks that a ect MANET. Proposed security mechanism more suitable for a less resource MANET such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN).It prevents routing attacks by au- thenticating and validating integrity of routing messages such as route re- quest and route reply with having an asymmetric security mechanism. Shar- ing a secret master key among all node in the network, it is impossible to achieve an asymmetric security. Therefore hash based message authenti- cation code (HMAC) M with a random number n which used to generate HMAC, are used with each routing messages by attaching them with the message. HAMC generation function works on cipher feedback mode and it will loop the process up to n times for a given routing message and given random number n, and return M. This mechanism is used in both route request and reply message generation and veri cation of those routing mes- sages. Proposed security mechanism courses to a route discovery latency but saves the average power consumption during the route discovery. It is important to select a better range for random number since it courses to the cost of computation.