In IPv6 based MANETs, the neighbor discovery enables nodes to self-configure
and communicate with neighbor nodes through autoconfiguration. The Stateless
address autoconfiguration (SLAAC) has proven to face several security issues.
Even though the Secure Neighbor Discovery (SeND) uses Cryptographically
Generated Addresses (CGA) to address these issues, it creates other concerns
such as need for CA to authenticate hosts, exposure to CPU exhaustion attacks
and high computational intensity. These issues are major concern for MANETs as
it possesses limited bandwidth and processing power. The paper proposes
empirically strong Light Weight Cryptographic Address Generation (LW-CGA) using
entropy gathered from system states. Even the system users cannot monitor these
system states; hence LW-CGA provides high security with minimal computational
complexity and proves to be more suitable for MANETs. The LW-CGA and SeND are
implemented and tested to study the performances. The evaluation shows that
LW-CGA with good runtime throughput takes minimal address generation latency.Comment: 13 Page