A lightweight authentication protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

The characteristics of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) determine that the authentication approaches to protect routing and data packet transmission in MANETs should be lightweight and scalable. In this paper, we propose a lightweight authentication protocol, which utilizes one-way hash chain to provide effective and efficient authentication for communications between neighboring nodes in MANETs. The security properties and performance are also analyzed in the paper. The analysis shows that the protocol incurs low overhead penalty and achieves a tradeoff between security and performance.