Abstract Securing ad hoc routing protocols for MANETs is a significant challenge due to number of reasons: (1) mobility results in continuously changing network topology – the premise of stable self or non-self is void, (2) the proposed security solution must be lightweight so that it can be deployed on resource constrained mobile nodes, and (3) the solution should provide high detection accuracy and low false positive rate. The major contribution of this paper is a hybrid AIS model – combining the relevant features of classical self/non-self paradigm with the emerging danger theory paradigm – that has the capability to meet the above-mentioned challenges of the MANET environment. As a case study, we use our hybrid model to develop a power aware security framework for BeeAdHoc– a well-known bio-inspired routing protocol. We have realized our framework in ns-2 simulator. We have also developed an attacker framework in ns-2 that has the capability to launch a number of Byzantine attacks on BeeAdHoc. The results of our experiments show that our proposed framework meets all its requirements: (1) the adaptive learning because of changing self/non-self, (2) high detection accuracy and low false positive rate, (3) lightweight in terms of processing and communication overheads, and (4) better or comparable performance compared with non-secure versions of existing state-of-the-art MANET routing protocols – DSR and AODV. We have also compared our hybrid AIS model with self/non-self, danger theory and a conventional anomaly detection system to show its merits over these schemes. Finally, we propose an extension of the framework for securing DSR.