Security Threats in Ad Hoc Routing Protocols

Abstract

The lack of infrastructure and centralized nodes in ad hoc networks have made nodes to depend on the cooperative nature of neighbor nodes for critical services like routing and maintenance. This unique cooperative nature of ad hoc network’s routing mechanism has spawned unprecedented security threats in the routing protocol. Attackers have the potential to directly disrupt the routing protocol communications, which is transparent in conventional wired and wireless networks. A routing attack scenario is composed of a sequence of attack behaviors, and an attack behavior is a sequence of elementary attack behaviors, which is executed in particular fashion. The chapter enumerates in detail the routing attack scenarios and their elements. Also, the chapter introduces a security threat analysis that is used to explore different attack scenarios and behaviors in ad hoc routing protocols. The observations made in the threat analysis are useful for understanding the security vulnerabilities and realizing the requisites of a security system design for ad hoc networks.