Building Blocks for Secure Communication in Ad-hoc Networks

Security is one of the main concerns in modern networks. Given the recent success of wireless networks, there are plenty of possibilities to attack the networks themselves [14][24] or services [28] running on these networks. Current progress in research and growing interest from the industry let also expect more and more sophisticated Ad-hoc networking solutions. Compared with security problems in conventional wireless networks1 Adhoc networks are exposed to additional risks. In addition to that a reasonable level of security seems to be more difficult to achieve in these networks due to their dynamic and distributed nature. This paper will give an overview about basic security problems in Ad-hoc networks and the research that has been conducted in related areas so far. It presents some algorithms that can be used as building blocks for security in Ad-hoc networks. Given the constraints faced by such networks, the paper also inspects its practicability in Ad-hoc environments.