Abstract
In wireless ad hoc networks, frequent topology changes and the absence of any centralized control make the networks vulnerable to many security attacks not present in a traditional wired network. Existing routing protocols offer little or no security to address these vulnerabilities. In this paper, we describe a security scheme based on the working of cluster based routing protocol (CBRP). Using threshold cryptography we eliminate the use of a centralized certification authority to distribute the process of certification among the nodes of the network. We make use of a combination of public key and symmetric key cryptography for authentication and exchange of data. This approach can as well be easily extended to other hierarchical routing protocols.