Furthermore, MANETs are dynamic because their topology may change frequently
and nodes may often join and leave the network. Security solutions based on a static
configuration of the network would thus not be sufficient.
Finally, a MANET can become enormous and contain hundreds or, even thousands,
of nodes. Security mechanisms should be scalable to handle such large networks.
Many security solutions have been proposed to implement security in MANETs.
In [1], the authors propose a solution based on group management. The whole net-
work is a hierarchy of special purpose groups and sub-groups defined in accordance
to the application context. The hierarchy signifies that a group can comprise several
sub-groups and each sub-group can comprise several sub-sub-groups. A management
framework is provided for establishing and managing this hierarchy. This framework
supports control on group composition and allows for basic operation such as group
joins and leaves. A manager administrates each group and sub-group. It is responsible
for creating and maintaining group and for receiving and processing group operations
sent by users. The manager is selected after a mechanism described in [2], this mecha-
nism allows automatically selecting a manager by taking into account the status of the
network and the capacity of the node. Mobile code is used to manages group and to
determine if a node can become a manager.
A solution, which is considered as a method to strengthen the security in MANETs,
is intrusion detection. Intrusion detection systems (IDS) allow detecting violations aga-
inst the security policy. In a MANET, it is difficult to analyze network activities globally.
Each node only possesses a limited vision of the network’s activities. This limit depends
on the characteristics of stations and is an important constraint for intrusion detection
algorithm. Each station thus needs its own intrusion detection system, and makes it
participate in the network’s global intrusion detection mechanism.
[3] and [4] propose this kind of IDS. [3] uses independent agents on each station
to locally detect intrusions. When a local anomaly is detected or evidence is not clear,
the agents participate in a global detection. [4] proposes an architecture for IDS in
which information is collected and exchanged using mobile agents. To determine if an
intrusion is occurring, a node uses local information and more information gathered
from remote nodes by the agents. Information collected remotely will only be usable if
it can be trusted, i.e if the nodes it was obtained from are trusted by the gathering agent.
[5] proposes another solution for security: secure routing protocol. The authors add
the notion of trust to the routing protocol AODV (Ad-hoc On demand Distance Vector
routing). In this protocol, routing information is encrypted so that a malicious node can-
not know who the sender is and nodes included in the route are authenticated. Encryp-
tion levels are selected in accordance with the trust levels existing between successive
nodes and the level of security required by the application, needing the route. However,
[5] does not specify how the trust level between nodes is determined.
In [6], Prashant Dewan and Partha Dasgupta make use of the concept of reputation
in the routing protocol of MANETs. Reputation of an entity is determined through
its past behavior. It is used to calculate probability that transactions between nodes
are satisfied. The reputation of an entity is increased when it successfully transfers
data packets and decreased when it does not. Each entity keeps information about the
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