Security Issues in Manet and Counter-Measures

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) are self-configuring networks of mobile nodes connected by wireless links. These nodes are able to move randomly and organize themselves and thus, the network's wireless architecture change rapidly and unpredictably. MANETs are usually utilized in situations of emergency for temporary operations or when there are no resources to set up elaborate networks. Mobile Ad-hoc Networks operate in the absence of any fixed infrastructure, which makes them easy to deploy, at the same time however, due to the absence of any fixed infrastructure, it becomes difficult to make use of the existing routing techniques for network services, and this poses a number of challenges in ensuring the security of the communication network, something that is not easily done as many of the demands of network security conflict with the demands of mobile networks due to the nature of the mobile devices (e.g. low power consumption, low processing load). Most of the ad-hoc routing protocols that address security issues rely on implicit trust relationships to route packets among participating nodes. Apart from security objectives like authentication, availability, confidentiality, and integrity, the ad-hoc routing protocols should also address location confidentiality, cooperation fairness and absence of traffic diversion. In this paper we attempt to survey security issues faced by the mobile ad-hoc network environment and provide a classification of the various security mechanisms. We also analyzed the respective strengths and vulnerabilities of the existing routing protocols and proposed a broad and comprehensive frame-work that can provide a tangible solution