A survey on security in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) has for several years been viewed as a promising technology for several application areas where fixed infrastructure is either unreliable or non-existent. Although the technology has been around for quite some time it has yet to become widely deployed. There may be several reasons for this; however a contributing factor is the lack of agreed upon security mechanisms for MANETs, making it difficult for users and organisations to specify the desired level of protection. In this paper we describe proposed security mechanisms and discuss how they fulfil the high level security goals of availability, confidentiality, integrity, authentication and non-repudiation. Based on this discussion we also point out important areas for further research.