Surveying Solutions to Securing On-Demand Routing Protocols in MANETs

A Mobile ad hoc Network or MANET is a wireless network of mobile devices that has the ability to self-configure and self-organise and is characterised by an absence of centralised administration and network infrastructure. An appreciable number of routing protocols used in a typical MANET have left the critical aspect of security out of consideration by assuming that all of its constituent nodes are trustworthy and non-malicious. In this paper, we discuss some of the major threats that such networks are vulnerable to, because of these inherently insecure protocols. The focus is specifically on the source-initiated and on-demand routing protocols. Further, solutions and modifications to these protocols that have been proposed over time, enabling them to mitigate the aforementioned threats to some extent, are also analysed.