An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes dynamically forming a temporary network without the use of any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. There are a number of routing protocols developed by researchers. Due to the nature of ad hoc networks, secure routing is an important area of research in developing secured routing protocols. Although researchers have proposed several secure routing protocols, their resistance towards various types of security attacks and efficiency are primary points of concern in implementing these protocols. Hence there is a need for evaluation. Some of the available secure routing protocols and most common attack patterns against ad hoc networks are studied and discussed. These secure ad hoc routing protocols are analysed in their performance. The analysis process is done in two phases. Firstly case studies of common attack patterns are carried on secure routing like denial-of-service attack, tunnelling, spoofing, black hole attack and wormhole attack. And then in second phase selected secure routing protocols are subjected to simulation tests using NS-2 simulation tool by commonly known ad hoc performance metrics: packet delivery ratio, byte overhead, packet overhead, medial latency and average end-to-end delay. Finally observed results for the two phases and scope of future work are discussed.