Abstract This paper presents a novel concept for designing an efficient security solution that can protect wireless ad hoc networks from heterogeneous attacks. This proposed Secure Routing Protocol against Heterogeneous Attacks (SRPAHA) protocol effectively detects and defends the collaborative malicious node without the need of expensive signatures. Finally, this methods had been validated through numerous simulation scenarios that synthetically generates the data sets and verifies using various parameters such as Route Acquisition Time, Throughput (or packet delivery ratio), Routing Overhead and Average End-to-End Delay. Moreover, the results of this work provide better performances as compared to existing security schemes in-terms of security, less communication overhead.