Security issues in ad-hoc networks have attracted attention of the researchers in the recent past. Ad-hoc networks pose more serious threats than conventional networks in many respects. The serious nature of these threats are due to some inherent features of an ad-hoc network like use of wireless links, lack of infrastructure and physical security and dynamic change in configuration. Modern implementations of ad-hoc networks like sensor networks in military applications or in a rescue mission need to be secured to the fullest extent to prevent any type of external or internal damage.

Although security issues in ad-hoc networks have drawn considerable attention over the past few years, not much work is being done to make the routing protocols secured in an ad-hoc scenario. In this research we intends to find a secure route in an ad-hoc network application which can withstand the attack of any malicious entity or a compromised node. Our protocol should be robust against any internal attack within the network tending to inject malicious routing information and disrupting the network operation. We intend to find a secure and efficient route to a destination based on collaborative effort of all the nodes.

Ad-hoc networks have given rise to active research issues since the recent past. The research community has been actively working on various challenges and problems that arise out of the effective implementation of ad-hoc networks. Most of the research, so far, has been done on the area of routing protocols. Thus the security issues in ad-hoc networks have been left mostly unexplored. As the ad-hoc nodes are characterized by minimum trust for each other, key management and distribution has been a challenging research issue. Most of the work on key distribution in ad-hoc networks is based on threshold cryptography and they assume the use of public key cryptosystem. The use of public key cryptography in ad-hoc networks is very limited due to the limited computational abilities of the nodes and hence is better to avoid. Thus, key distribution and efficient key management in an ad-hoc scenario are challenging research issues which are to be addressed with extreme sophistication. The motivation of our research is based on the above. We intend to find out an efficient algorithm for secured key distribution in an ad-hoc network characterized by minimum level of trust among the nodes, their limited computational power and lack of physical security.

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