Abstract Lightweight trust mechanism with lightweight cryptography primitives and post-quantum cryptosystems are having important concerns in resource constraint wireless sensor based Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). In postquantum cryptosystems, error correcting codes (ECC) help in code based cryptography for lightweight identification, authentication, distance bounding and tag with ownership transfer protocols to provide security. In this work, a novel approach is designed to secure the RFID-Sensor based MANET that uses ECC for assigning identification to resource constrained mobile nodes. This assignment helps to create centralized environment with subgroups, groups and hierarchies. Group or subgroups boundaries are limited through distance bounding protocols. Trust management plays the role of maintaining the relationship between nodes for long endeavor. Probability analysis of distance bounding protocol shows that the proposed approach is protected from mafia fraud, distance fraud, terrorist fraud, and distance hijacking attacks. The success of these attacks on the proposed mechanism dependence on trust score: lesser trust score (≤ 50) increases the chances of these attacks whereas higher trust score protects the network from these attacks and improves the network performance as well. In performance analysis, it is observed that the Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) outperforms the other MANET routing protocols in terms of network performance and security for the proposed scheme. However, the probabilistic analysis proves that it is still possible to control outliers in the network despite the new inserted defenses with trust management and limited resources
