Attacks against ad-hoc routing protocols can be classified as active or passive. A passive attack does not disrupt the operation of the protocol, but tries to discover valuable information by listening to traffic. An active attack injects arbitrary packets and tries to disrupt the operation of the protocol in order to limit the availability, gain authentication, or attract packets destined or other nodes.

In conclusion, most of the proposed routing solutions are, as yet, incomplete when it comes to security issues. We can trust a routing mechanism only when it guarantees that all transmission will be protected. Rather than treating these problems on individual basis, we'll need to work out routing along with security in mobile ad-hoc network designs going into the future.