Circle of trust: One-hop-trust-based security paradigm for resource-constraint MANET

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) suffer from acute crisis of resources in terms of battery power, computational ability, and so on. This together with its inherent salient nature makes it very difficult to design effective and efficient security solutions for the MANET. In this kind of dynamic environment, the nodes cannot rely on the conventional measures pertaining to the wired networks. Thus, approaches that depend on trust establishment and evaluation among the nodes are being considered as significant strides toward data protection, secure routing, and other secure network activities. Most of these models can be deemed as rather unscalable due to an excessive exhaustion of resources. In this paper, we limit the region of concern for each node to its one-hop locality and thereby considerably reduce the network overhead. This simple approach to security depending on the principle of mutual trust and prioritization of self-experience has been shown to be effective against a pool of common attacks and feasible with respect to the architectural demand of MANET.