Routing Mechanism for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks with Improved Security Features

Abstract

MANET is a type of wireless network without a fixed topology and consists of set of self-organized nodes. The nodes are randomly, frequently and unpredictably mobile. The inherent features make them an ideal choice in military and civilian communication applications. Major performance constraint of these types of networks comes from security attacks due to the dynamic topology and lack of centralized monitoring authority. Both passive and active attacks adversely affect the normal functionality of the network. Passive attackers monitor the network traffic and nodes in the networks. Active attacks like Blackhole attackers can drop packets partially or completely from the network. Secure routing protocol can conceal the identities and locations of route, source and destination to provide security and privacy from intruder’s attacks. So in this paper, a route selection method is introduced for MANET which improves the security features for source, destination and route against passive attacks and specified active attacks. The developed method dynamically partitions the entire communication area in to different zones and randomly chooses a position from the divided zones as the temporary destination. The node which is very close to the position is selected as the random forwarder node and data is transmitted through random forwarder node using GPSR. The proposed method provide both identity and location anonymity to nodes. Methods are also proposed for avoiding the timing attacks. Position of active attacker like Blackhole attackers in the route are obtained and eliminated by using Hom omorphic Message Authentication method.