A flexible approach for securing MANETs

Mobile ad-hoc networks are becoming popular day by day due to their characteristic features like wireless nature, dynamic topology, self healing mechanism and infrastructureless environment. In spite of having such properties, ad-hoc networks are considered to be less secure as most of the routing protocols developed focus on enhancing the routing capabilities. Even though in some routing protocols, security aspect is non-trivial, the model of security is fixed in the sense that these protocols tend to work with the limited set of algorithms. Secure routing protocols require certain cryptographic algorithms in order to ascertain confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, availability and non-repudiation of routing data. Cryptographic algorithms hold performance, security trade-off, that is, if certain level of performance is required, then one needs to compromise a little on security and vice-versa. This feature can be exploited to provide flexibility as a part of the user wherein one is free to select required security as per requirements leading to efficient utilization of resources which is typically a constraint in ad-hoc networks. This paper provides a proposed flexible, secure routing protocol for ad-hoc networks, which will harmonize performance, security trade-off by the application of certain modifications in SAODV protocol.