Automatic IP address assignment in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) enablesnodes to obtain routable addresses without any infrastructure. Differentprotocols have been developed throughout the last years to achieve thisservice. However, research primarily focused on correctness, efficiency andscalability; much less attention has been given to the security issues. Thelack of security in the design of such protocols opens the possibility of manyreal threats leading to serious attacks in potentially hostile environments.Recently, few schemes have been proposed to solve this problem, but none ofthem has brought satisfactory solutions. Auto-configuration security issues arestill an open problem. In this paper, a robust and secure stateful IP addressallocation protocol for standalone MANETs is specified and evaluated withinNS2. Our solution is based on mutual authentication, and a fully distributedAutoconfiguration and CA model, in conjunction with threshold cryptography. Bydeploying a new concept of joint IP address and public key certificate, we showthat, instead of earlier approaches, our solution solves the problem of allpossible attacks associated with dynamic IP address assignment in MANETs. Theresulting protocol incurs low latency and control overhead
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