A secure and efficient route discovery protocol is proposed for ad hoc networks, where only one-way hash functions are used to authenticate nodes in the ROUTE REQUEST, while additional public-key cryptography is used to guard against active attackers disguising a node in the ROUTE REPLY.

In the meantime, most secure ad hoc routing protocols based on cryptography just have assumed that pair-wise secret keys or public keys were distributed among nodes before running a routing protocol. In this paper, we raise a question about key management related to existing secure routing protocols, and then we propose an authenticated on-demand ad hoc routing protocol with key exchange by applying the ID-based keyed authenticator. In particular, we focus on providing an authentication mechanism to Dynamic Source Routing protocol combined with Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol, and then we demonstrate simulated performance evaluations. The main contribution of our work is to provide a concurrent establishment of a route and a session key in a secure manner between source and destination nodes in ad hoc networks.

Recently, Yoon et al. exhibited the vulnerability of the smart-card-equipped password based authentication protocol proposed by Chien et al. to the Denning-Sacco attack. Furthermore, they also pointed out that the protocol does not provide the perfect forward secrecy. Accordingly, they presented an enhanced protocol to strengthen the security. This letter, however, demonstrates an interleaving attack on the Yoon et al.'s improved protocol and also discusses how to defend the protocol from the attack presented here.