Resource-aware self-adaptive security provisioning in mobile ad hoc networks

Providing satisfactory security services in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) is indispensable for mission critical applications; however, often a highly secure mechanism inevitably consumes a rather large amount of system resources, which in turn may unintentionally cause a security provisioning denial of service (SPDoS) attack. The scheme proposed in this paper sets out a framework to solve this problem by designing a resource-aware self-adaptive network security provisioning scheme. With the support of the offline optimal secure protocol selection module and the online self-adaptive security control module, the framework is capable of deploying different combinations of secure protocols to satisfy different security needs in different conditions for different applications. Consequently, the proposed self-adaptive security provisioning achieves the maximum overall network security services and network performance services, without causing an SPDoS attack. Moreover, it provides additional security capability via security service hopping.