A Node Authentication Mechanism for Securing MANETs.

In Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) the wireless nodes move frequently around the space and mutually cooperate with each other to perform routing and forwarding data. MANETs are infrastructure-less networks without any kind of central administration for the management of network. Due to this reason MANETs are comparatively more vulnerable to security threats than conventional wired or wireless networks. The network nodes in MANETs are susceptible a number of attacks due to the inherent nature and depicted properties of MANETs. Thus to prevent attacks it becomes very much mandatory to identify and authenticate each and every node during route discovery phase so that data can be communicated safely later on. In this paper we introduce an authentication mechanism that will enhance the security of standard AODV protocol. The protocol deploys unique prime factorization principle to achieve node authentication with minimal overhead. It detects and isolates unauthorized nodes from the network so as to avoid any kind of attacks from them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]