Secure Hybrid Routing for MANET Resilient to Internal and External Attacks

Abstract

An ad hoc network is the cooperative engagement of a collection of mobile nodes without the required intervention of any centralized access point or existing infrastructure. Although there is an increasing trend to adopt ad hoc networking for commercial uses, their main applications lie in military, tactical and other security-sensitive operations. In these and other applications of ad hoc networks, secure routing is an important issue. Quite a good number of protocols have been suggested in this area, but most of them are either proactive or reactive in approach. Studies reveal that, either a pure proactive or a pure reactive approach of routing performs well in a limited region of network setting. However, in diverse applications of ad hoc networks the performance of either class degrades dramatically. In this paper, we have presented a Secure Hybrid Routing Protocol (SHRP) for MANET, which aims at addressing the above limitations by combining the best properties of both proactive and reactive approaches. The protocol is based on the design of zone routing protocol (ZRP). The paper details the design of the protocol and analyses its robustness in the presence of multiple possible security attacks against ad hoc routing caused either by an internal compromised node or an external advisory.