Security enabled DSR for establishing symmetric key and security in MANETS

In recent years, MANETs have been developing rapidly and are increasingly being used in many applications, ranging from military to civilian and commercial uses. The security has become one of the primary concerns as MANETS are being used widely. To achieve security goals like: authentication, integrity, non-repudiation, privacy, a secret key is necessary to be shared between the sender and the receiver. Some popular key exchange protocols have some demerits in case of MANETs which are due to mainly the requirement of high computational capability. In this paper, we proposed security enhancements to DSR for providing an on-demand secure routing protocol. We also proposed an algorithm to exchange shared / session key between the source and the destination during the route creation itself. For the performance evaluation, NS2 simulator have been used and comparisons are made with the basic DSR protocol. This Security Enabled DSR (SEDSR) ensures security goals and can withstand against single node compromise.