LCAM: Lightweight Certificate Authority for MANET and Securing DSR Routing Protocol

Abstract A Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET), which is useful for infrastructure less quick wireless communication, will play a vital role in future network deployments. Due to ad-hoc and wireless characteristics, MANETs are highly vulnerable and they would not be viable without effective security protection. This paper designs a lightweight certificate authority (LCA) as a common security framework for MANETs and develops safeguard for a well-known reactive routing protocol called DSR (Dynamic Source Routing). Additionally, we propose a minor modification of DSR called modified DSR (mDSR), where a hop-count parameter as used in AODV (Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector) routing protocol is included. It is incorporated in RREQ/RRER messages of DSR for counting the number of hops in a route, and the same is used in efficient routing and enhanced security protection of MANETs. The security and performance analysis of the proposed methods are provided and compared with other techniques.