Patent ID: 7346167

Claim:
A secure mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) node comprising: a wireless communications device for establishing a wireless communications link with at least one adjacent MANET node in a MANET to establish at least one route to a destination MANET node based upon a MANET routing protocol to thereby transfer cipher text to the destination MANET node; a plain text source; a random initialization vector (IV) generator for generating a random IV; a seed generator for performing a one-way algorithm using a secret key and the random IV for generating a seed; a key encryptor receiving the seed and generating a key sequence based thereon; and a logic circuit generating the cipher text for transmission to the at least one adjacent MANET node over the wireless communications link and based upon the key sequence and the plain text; said random IV generator being coupled to said wireless communications device, and said wireless communications device transmitting the random IV with the cipher text.