Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Computers and Information - Department of Information Technology

In the last two decades, research in various aspects of mobile ad-hoc networks, (MANETs), has been very active and motivated by several applications in military, disaster relief and law enforcement scenarios. In such dynamic network environments, users may come from di{uFB00}erent domains i.e., there may be a conflict of interest among them, besides the number of users and the network topology may change unpredictably over time. How to protect the users{u2019} communication in such dynamic environments, therefore, is extremely challenging. This thesis investigates the key research problems of securing communication of users in dynamic network environments. In the literature, most of the proposed research addresses MANET security aspects separately, where researchers dealt with security issues such as secure routing, key management, secure address auto-configuration, access control, secure group communication and anonymous communication in separation of each other. But practically speaking, securing MANETs operations requires addressing all these issues collectively. Naturally, a comprehensive integrated solution for securing MANETs would incur an increase in computation and/or communication overheads. Hence investigating the design of an integrated security solution for MANETs is considered as a challenging problem.

Issued also as CD