Attacks In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Research Articles

Malicious Nodes Detection in MANETs: Behavioral Analysis Approach

The increased popularity and usage of wireless technologies has opened the doors for new emerging applications in the domain of networking. One emerging and promising areas is the domain of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). A mobile ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes that form a dynamic network without the need for infrastructure or centralized points. The dynamic nature of ad hoc networks presents many security challenges. Secure routing is a promising area for achieving better security for the network by protecting the routing protocols against malicious attacks. Several secure routing protocols have been proposed in the literatures that were successful in avoiding and preventing some types of security attacks in MANETs. However, MANETs are still vulnerable to other types of attacks. Hence, there is a need for introducing an efficient mechanism to detect malicious nodes. In this paper, a new mechanism is proposed that improves the performance of routing protocol against the malicious attacks. Since a malicious node behaves in abnormal ways, this mechanism proposes observing nodes behavior such as nodes’ mobility, and avoiding communication through these nodes which may lead to more secure routing.

Enhanced Timestamp Discrepancy to Limit Impact of Replay Attacks in MANETs

Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs), characterized by the free move of mobile nodes are more vulnerable to the trivial Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks such as replay attacks. A replay attacker performs this attack at anytime and anywhere in the network by interception and retransmission of the valid signed messages. Consequently, the MANET performance is severally degraded by the overhead produced by the redundant valid messages. In this paper, we propose an enhancement of timestamp discrepancy used to validate a signed message and consequently limiting the impact of a replay attack. Our proposed timestamp concept estimates approximately the time where the message is received and validated by the received node. This estimation is based on the existing parameters defined at the 802.11 MAC layer.

A misleading active routing attack in mobile ad-hoc networks

The growth of laptops, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and 802.11/Wi-Fi wireless networking have made Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) a popular research topic recently. Therefore, with more attention on MANETs lately, the security issues become more important and urgent for managing and deploying in such networks. The flexible deployment nature and the lake of fixed infrastructure make MANETs suffer from varieties of security attacks. In this paper, we propose the Misleading Routing Attack (MIRA), which is different from the well known gray/black hole attacks, in which a node is relaying the coming packets and not dropping them, so its neighbors will not report this node as malicious, since they will sense that this node is relaying the packets and not dropping them. This proposed attack aims to delay the packet as much as possible so as to let the source node timeout before it receives the ACK. Also it aims to overload the network by increasing the number of unexpected routing packets generated in the network. Our simulation results show that the existence of an adversary in the network launching a MIRA will degrade packet transmissions in the network as well as increasing the number of lost packets.

MODELLING OF A SECURE MECHANISM IN ROUTING PROTOCOL OF MANETS: APPLICATION OF THEORY OF GAMES

The present work is dedicated to the study of attacks and countermeasures in MANET. After a short introduction to what the Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are and network security we present a survey of various attacks in MANETs pertaining to fail routing protocols. We present the different tools used by these attacks and the mechanisms used by the secured routing protocols to counter them. We also study a mechanism of security, named the reputation, proposed for the MANETs and the protocol which implements it. We also propose a secure mechanism which is based on the reputation. Our work ends with a proposal analytical model to the modules of our mechanism.

"Performance Analysis of DSR, AODV Routing Protocols based on Wormhole Attack in Mobile Adhoc Network"

ad-hoc network are able work without any existing infrastructure. MANET is a self configure network connected by wireless links. Mobile ad-hoc network uses temporary network which is able to work without any centralize administration or stand alone infrastructure. In mobile ad-hoc network each device move in any direction without any restriction so it changes it links to often with other devices present in same network. Mobility of mobile device anywhere in the network without any centralize administration makes it difficult to manage routing. In mobile ad-hoc network each device need to forward traffic that is not related to its own use and therefore each device work as a router. In this paper we have compared the performance of two On-Demand MANET routing protocol AODV and DSR by using random waypoint mobility model and changing the node density with varying number of source node. DSR and AODV both protocol uses On-Demand route discovery concept but internal mechanism which they use to find the route is significantly different for both protocol. We have analyzed the performance of protocols for low and high node density (50 and 100 nodes) on a 750m*750m area with varying source node and random waypoint mobility model. Simulation with random waypoint mobility model has been carried out by using Qualnet 5.0.2 Simulator. The metrics used for performance evaluation are packet Delivery fraction, Average End-to-End Delay, Average Jitter, and number of packet dropped for buffer overflow.

Design Enhancements in ZRP for Detecting Multiple Black Hole Nodes in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

a day, security in Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is very important issue. Due to dynamic topology and mobility of nodes, Mobile Ad hoc Networks are more vulnerable to security attacks than conventional wired and wireless network. Nodes of Mobile Ad hoc Network communicate directly without any central base station. That means in ad hoc network, infrastructure is not required for establishing communication. Mobile ad hoc Network (MANET) is different than wireless sensor network (WSN). Mobile ad hoc network is more vulnerable than WSN. Therefore attacks in MANETs are very frequent than other networks. In this research paper we are describing black hole attacks which are easy to launch in wireless ad hoc network. Black hole attack is referred to as a node dropping all packets and sending forged routing packets to route packets over itself. In this paper, we are considering a zone with multiple black hole nodes that can work co-operatively and we are implementing Secure-ZRP protocol which can be used to prevent black hole attack in MANETs. We evaluated performance in Qualnet simulator. Our analysis indicates that S-ZRP is very suitable & efficient protocol to stop this attack.

A Literature Review of Security Attack in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Security is a major concern for protected communication between mobile nodes in a hostile environment. In hostile environments adversaries can bunch active and passive attacks against intercept able routing in embed in routing message and data packets. In this paper, we focus on fundamental security attacks in Mobile adhoc networks. MANET has no clear line of defense, so, it is accessible to both legitimate network users and malicious attackers. In the presence of malicious nodes, one of the main challenges in MANET is to design the robust security solution that can protect MANET from various routing attacks. However, these solution are not suitable for MANET resource constraints, i.e., limited bandwidth and battery power, because they introduce heavy traffic load to exchange and verifying keys. MANET can operate in isolation or in coordination with a wired infrastructure, often through a gateway node participating in both networks for traffic relay. This flexibility, along with their selforganizing capabilities, are some of MANET's biggest strengths, as well as their biggest security weaknesses. In this paper different routing attacks, such as active(flooding, black hole, spoofing, wormhole) and passive(eavesdropping, traffic monitoring, traffic analysis) are described.

A Flow Monitoring Scheme to Defend Reduction-of-Quality (RoQ) Attacks in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

ABSTRACT Reduction-of-Quality (RoQ) attack is a type of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack that is difficult to detect in current computing systems and networks. These RoQ attacks throttle the throughput heavily and reduce the Quality of Service (QoS) to end systems gradually rather than refusing the clients from the services completely. In this paper, we propose to develop a flow monitoring scheme to defend against such attacks in mobile Ad-hoc networks. Our proposed defense mechanism consists of a flow monitoring table (FMT) at each node to identify the attackers. If the channel continues to be congested because some sender nodes do not reduce their sending rate, it can be found by the destination using the updated FMT. Once the attackers are identified, all packets from those nodes will be blocked. By simulation results, we show that our proposed scheme achieves higher throughput and packet delivery ratio with reduced packet drop for legitimate users.

Detection and Removal of Cooperative Black/Gray hole attack in Mobile AdHoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are widely used in places where there is little or no infrastructure. A number of people with mobile devices may connect together to form a large group. Later on they may split into smaller groups. This dynamically changing network topology of MANETs makes it vulnerable for a wide range of attack. In this paper we propose a complete protocol for detection & removal of networking Black/Gray Holes.

A secure multipath routing protocol in mobile ad hoc networks

AbstractMultipath routing can adapt to traffic changes, increase reliability and enhance the Quality of Service support in communication networks. This routing algorithm has been recognized as one of the salient features in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). However, existing multipath routing protocols are often practically infeasible due to its security venerability if they suffer from attacks in MANETs, such as repudiation attacks, Denial of Service attacks. In this paper we propose a novel secure multipath routing protocol, referred to as SMRP, and investigate its feasibility and performance. SMRP applies a new heuristic algorithm increasing the number of disjoint paths and a smart authentication mechanism to enhance the security against the attacks in MANETs. The performance results from extensive analysis and experiments show that SMRP can efficiently enhance the security in MANETs while preserving the low overhead of computing and communication. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Mobility and Cooperation to Thwart Node Capture Attacks in MANETs

The nature of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), often unattended, makes this type of networks subject to some unique security issues. In particular, one of the most vexing problem for MANETs security is the node capture attack: an adversary can capture a node from the network eventually acquiring all the cryptographic material stored in it. Further, the captured node can be reprogrammed by the adversary and redeployed in the network in order to perform malicious activities. In this paper, we address the node capture attack in MANETs. We start from the intuition that mobility, in conjunction with a reduced amount of local cooperation, helps computing effectively and with a limited resource usage network global security properties. Then, we develop this intuition and use it to design a mechanism to detect the node capture attack. We support our proposal with a wide set of experiments showing that mobile networks can leverage mobility to compute global security properties, like node capture detection, with a small overhead.

MODSBR: An Enhanced Methodology for Defending Byzantine Attacks on Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Byzantine attacks signify a risk to Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). One of the efficient routing protocols used to mitigate such attacks in MANETs is the On-Demand Secure Byzantine Routing protocol (ODSBR). In this paper, we present the Modified ODSBR (MODSBR) where several enhancements for the performance and security of ODSBR are implemented. The first of these enhancements is enabling route caching in an elegant way that causes a notable decreasein the routing overhead. The central clustered link weight management (CLWM) is a secure technique utilized by MODSBR to detect malicious nodes through a set of management nodes (MN). The effect of the proposed enhancements is evaluated with respect to different types of Byzantine attacks. Simulation experiments show that MODSBR outperforms ODSBR by an average 23% decrease in routing overhead and a 10 % increase in the delivery ratio for different mobility values.

Performance Analysis of Disable IP Broadcast Technique for Prevention of Flooding-Based DDoS Attack in MANET

In Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET), various types of Denial of Service Attacks (DoS) are possible because of the inherent limitations of its routing protocols. Considering the Ad hoc On Demand Vector (AODV) routing protocol as the base protocol it is possible to find a suitable solution to overcome the malicious flooding i.e. attack of initiating / forwarding Route Requests (RREQs) that lead to hogging of network resources and packet dropping is a technique in which a node drops data packets (conditionally or randomly) that it is supposed to forward hence denial of service to genuine nodes. In this paper, a technique is proposed that can prevent a specific kind of DoS attack i.e. flood attack which Disable IP Broadcast. The proposed scheme is distributed in nature it has the capability to prevent Distributed DoS (DDoS) attack. The performance of the proposed algorithm in a series of simulations reveals that the proposed scheme provides a better solution than existing approaches.

A Threshold-Adaptive Reputation System on Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In recent years huge potential benefits from novel applications in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) have been discussed extensively. However, without robust security mechanisms and systems to provide safety shell through the MANET infrastructure, MANET applications can be vulnerable and hammered by malicious attackers easily. In order to detect misbehaved message routing and identify malicious attackers in MANET, schemes based on reputation concept have shown their advantages in this area in terms of good scalability and simple threshold-based detection strategy. We observed that previous reputation schemes generally use predefined thresholds which do not take into account the effect of behavior dynamics between nodes in a period of time. In this paper, we propose a Threshold-Adaptive Reputation System (TARS) to overcome the shortcomings of static threshold strategy and improve the overall MANET performance under misbehaved routing attack. A fuzzy-based inference engine is introduced to evaluate the trustiness of a node's one-hop neighbors. Malicious nodes whose trust values are lower than the adaptive threshold, will be detected and filtered out by their honest neighbors during trustiness evaluation process. The results of network simulation show that the TARS outperforms other compared schemes under security attacks in most cases and at the same time reduces the decrease of total packet delivery ratio by 67% in comparison with MANET without reputation system.

Detection and Prevention of Wormhole Attack in Mobile Adhoc Networks

Wireless networks are suspectible to many attacks, including an attack known as the wormhole attack. The wormhole attack is very powerful, and preventing the attack has proven to be very difficult. A strategic placement of the wormhole can result in a significant breakdown in communication across a wireless network. In such attacks two or more malicious colluding nodes create a higher-level virtual tunnel in the network, which is employed to transport packets between the tunnel endpoints. These tunnels emulate shorter links in the network and so act as benefit to unsuspecting network nodes which by default seek shorter routes. This paper present a novel trust-based scheme for identifying and isolating nodes that create a wormhole in the network without engaging any cryptographic means. With the help of extensive simulations, we demonstrate that our scheme functions effectively in the presence of malicious colluding nodes and does not impose any unnecessary conditions upon the network establishment and operation phase. An ad-hoc network is built, operated, and maintained by its constituent wireless nodes. These nodes generally have a limited transmission range and so each node seeks the assistance of its neighbouring nodes in forwarding packets . In order, to establish routes between nodes, which are farther than a single hop, specially configured routing protocol are engaged. The unique feature of these protocols is their ability to trace routes in spite of a dynamic topology. The nodes in an ad-hoc network generally have limited battery power and so active routing protocols endeavor to save upon this, by discovering routes only when they are essentially required. In contrast, proactive routing protocols continuously establish and maintain routes, so as to avoid the latency that occurs during new route discoveries. Both types of routing protocols require persistent cooperative behaviour, with intermediate nodes primarily contributing to

Multivariate Fuzzy Analysis for Mobile Ad hoc Network Threat Detection

Detection of malicious, compromised and selfish node attacks is urgently needed to protect Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) and their applications from failures. Once a MANET component is affected by a malicious, compromised or selfish node its operational state shifts from normal state to vulnerable state. Online monitoring mechanisms can collect important MANET network data that can be effectively used to detect abnormal behaviors caused by attacks. In this article we develop an online multivariate analysis algorithm to analyze the behavior of network resources and protocols to proactively detect MANET attacks. This algorithm is based on multivariate fuzzy analysis technique. We have validated the algorithm and demonstrated how it can effectively detect wellknown attacks such as Denial of Service in MANET.

Defending against packet dropping attack in vehicular ad hoc networks

AbstractVehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are becoming very popular and a promising application of the so‐called mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) technology. It has attracted recently an increasing attention from many car manufacturers as well as the wireless communication research community. Despite its tremendous potential to enhance road safety and to facilitate traffic management, VANET suffers from a variety of security and privacy issues which may dramatically limit their applications. In this paper, we address the problem of packet dropping attack launched against routing protocol's control packets, which represents one of the most aggressive attacks in MANET. The aim of this attack is to force nodes in the network to choose hostile nodes as relays to disseminate the partial topological information, thereby exploiting the functionality of the routing protocol to retain control packets. In particular, in optimized link state routing (OLSR) protocol, if a collusive packet dropping attack is launched during the propagation of the topology control (TC) packets, the topology information will fail in being disseminated to the entire network, which finally results in routing disruption. This paper focuses on the packet dropping attack, launched against OLSR, where two malicious multipoint relay (MPR) nodes collude to disrupt the topology discovery process. Based on the analysis of the attacker's behavior and the attack's consequence, we propose an acknowledgement‐based mechanism as a countermeasure to enhance the security of OLSR. This mechanism helps the OLSR protocol to be less vulnerable to such attack by detecting and then isolating malicious nodes in the network. The simulation results of the proposed scheme show high detection rate under various scenarios. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Prevention of Co-operative Black Hole Attack in MANET

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an autonomous network that consists of mobile nodes that communicate with each other over wireless links. In the absence of a fixed infrastructure, nodes have to cooperate in order to provide the necessary network functionality. One of the principal routing protocols used in Ad hoc networks is AODV (Ad hoc On demand Distance Vector) protocol. The security of the AODV protocol is compromised by a particular type of attack called ‘Black Hole’ attack In this attack a malicious node advertises itself as having the shortest path to the node whose packets it wants to intercept. To reduce the probability it is proposed to wait and check the replies from all the neighboring nodes to find a safe route. Our approach to combat the Black hole attack is to make use of a ‘Fidelity Table’ wherein every participating node will be assigned a fidelity level that acts as a measure of reliability of that node. In case the level of any node drops to 0, it is considered to be a malicious node, termed as a ‘Black hole’ and is eliminated. Computer simulation using GLOMOSIM shows that our protocol provides better security and also better performance in terms of packet delivery than the conventional AODV in the presence of Black holes with minimal additional delay and Overhead.

An Approach for Detecting Attacks in Mobile Adhoc Networks

The security of data becomes more important with the increased use of commercial applications over wireless network environments. We presented an approach to handle various attacks for wireless networks. There were several problems of security in wireless networks due to intruders and different type of attacks such as Node Isolation, Route Disruption and Resource Consumption. There were better methods and intruder handling procedures available for fixed networks but it was difficult to analyze attacks in the mobile adhoc environments. The reason was due high mobility of network nodes and lack of fixed infrastructure. Normally, attacks by an intruder cause unauthorized use of the wireless network so that the whole network will be suffered from packet losses and reduced throughput. So, we have performed a study on various issues of threats for Mobile Adhoc Networks and presented an approach to handle such threats efficiently. The main principle was to use my-AODV agent to introduce various attacks on existing AODV MANET routing protocol.

Analysis of a reputation system for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks with liars

The application of decentralized reputation systems is a promising approach to ensure cooperation and fairness, as well as to address random failures and malicious attacks in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks. However, they are potentially vulnerable to liars. With our work, we provide a first step to analyzing robustness of a reputation system based on a deviation test. Using a mean-field approach to our stochastic process model, we show that liars have no impact unless their number exceeds a certain threshold (phase transition). We give precise formulae for the critical values and thus provide guidelines for an optimal choice of parameters.