A survey of secure address auto-configuration in MANET

Mobile ad hoc networking offers convenient infrastructure-less communication over the shared wireless channels. The major research efforts in the area of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) focus on developing efficient routing protocols assuming that IP addresses of mobile hosts have been already configured before joining the network. Providing security for IP address auto-configuration in MANET is still an open problem. Existing solutions for IP address autoconfiguration in MANET do not address security issues. However, it may disserve network security if there is not a reliable authentication mechanism, e.g. an attacker may spoof other nodes and hijack their traffic. Unlike their wired counterpart, infrastructure-less ad hoc networks do not have a clear line of defense, and every node must be prepared for encountering with an adversary. Therefore, a centralized or hierarchical network security solution does not work well. This paper describes the state of research in secure address auto-configuration problem and analyzes the current existing solutions.