New trust based security approach for ad-hoc networks

Secure routing is the milestone in mobile ad hoc networks. Ad hoc networks are widely used in military and other scientific areas with nodes which can move arbitrarily and connect to any nodes at will, it is impossible for Ad hoc network to own a fixed infrastructure. It also has a certain number of characteristics which make the security difficult. Routing is always the most significant part for any networks. We design a trust based packet forwarding scheme for detecting and isolating the malicious nodes using the routing layer information. This paper gives an overview about trust in MANETs and current research in routing on the basis of trust. It uses trust values to favor packet forwarding by maintaining a trust counter for each node. A node will be punished or rewarded by decreasing or increasing the trust counter. If the trust counter value falls below a trust threshold, the corresponding intermediate node is marked as malicious.