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In this paper, we examine security issues related to proactive routing protocols for MANETs. Specifically, we investigate security properties of the Optimized Link-State Routing Protocol-one example of a proactive routing protocol for MANETs. We investigate the possible attacks against the integrity of the network routing infrastructure, and present techniques for countering a variety of such attacks. Our main approach is based on authentication checks of information injected into the network. However even with perfect authentication check, replay attacks are still possible. Hence, we develop a distributed timestamp-based approach for verifying if a message is “old” or “current”. We finally present two different, simple algorithms for distributing public keys in a MANET, in order to provide a mechanism permitting authentication checks to be conducted. While we use OLSR as an example protocol for our studies, we argue that the presented techniques apply equally to any proactive routing protocol for MANETs