Abstract: Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is an important field in while many of the users are using mobile devices for last few years where ad-hoc routing in networks is one of the prominent issues. The routing protocol is aimed to offer best route from source to destination in terms of energy efficiency and security. Zone Based Hierarchical Link State Routing Protocol (ZHLS) is one among in hybrid routing protocols for Mobile ad-hoc network, which is not tolerable large number of internal attacks that come from malicious nodes. A malicious node is drops the routing information, data packets intentionally and disturb the process of the routing protocol. To solve this problem, we proposed a novel approach for effective key management, and prevention of malicious nodes. Security to the routing protocol is incorporated with traditional Secure Hashing Algorithm (SHA-256) symmetric and asymmetric key encryption methods. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed and results shown improvement in terms of the packet delivery fraction, communication overheads and percentage of released packets.

Keywords: MANET, ZHLS, SHA-256, Hashing, Communication Overhead.