Abstract

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) regarded to be a group of mobile nodes that can communicate with others in the absence of network infrastructure. MANET is at high risk due to its basic features, such as peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture; wireless shared medium, strictly constrained resources, extremely powerful network topology and open nodes for physical capture. Security is an essential service in all types of network communication. MANET must present security that raises human’s belief in MANET. This paper proposed the Four Stage Security Algorithm (FSSA) improve MANET security. First, secret keybased encryption and decryption provided in Stage 1. Then, public keybased encryption and private key based decryption provided in Stage 2. Followed by, signature generation and verification provided in Stage 3, at last, token-based access control provided in Stage 4. The experimental result shows the proposed FSSA algorithm provides robust security compared with other existing algorithms in MANET.