A secure and efficient certificate based authentication protocol for MANET

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), authentication is a critical issue. It is a tough task to provide security and authentication in MANETs due to the absence of any centralized administration and dynamic topology of the network. This paper presents a robust and secure mechanism for authentication of nodes in the MANET. The proposed authentication protocol is based on certificate exchange between the nodes. This protocol also uses digital signature with a hash function to maintain the authenticity of certificates. Simulation shows that this protocol shows better performance in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay and packet dropping in presence of malicious nodes in the MANET. In addition, it also has less computation and communication overhead, which makes it suitable for MANETs.