Keywords

Introduction

For several years now, there has been a clear example seen in daily life as the transference from the fixed network to wireless mobile networks for easiness in communication as there is no need for a licensed frequency band to act and the wireless mobile network does not require any investment in infrastructure as it can able to form a dynamic structure (Lohachab and Jangra 2019). These properties have an important role to make them appealing for some commercial implementation in various fields and most important in the military field. As there are many good things in a wireless mobile network, there is another side too that says, in wireless mobile network many problems occur; among them, network security is the most important concern (Nurlan et al. 2022). Mobile technology is rapidly growing, wireless mobile networks have shown in many forms such as laptops, PDAs, etc. There is a very high chance for attackers, as in a wireless mobile network, a node can be operated as a source, destination, and router (intermediate node). Communication in a wireless mobile network is done through messages, a network can send the data to its adjacent network via messages. And these networks do not contain any information about any other nodes/networks, whether the network is prone to attack or safe. They do not know each other (Bhushan and Sahoo 2017, 2018). Securing a wireless mobile network is tough because there are many reasons such as no boundaries, attack from an unfriendly node into the network, no facility of central management, the power supply is limited, extension ability, no protection of channels, changes in topology, etc.

The wireless mobile network usually has small devices which are more memory-constrained and more susceptible to failures. Although energy is a scarce resource for both kinds of networks, these networks have tighter requirements on network lifetime, and recharging or replacing the node’s batteries is much less of an option (Cuka et al. 2018). The basic purpose is focused on providing distributed computing and information gathering. Wireless mobile networks are used in environments like forests, mountains, rivers, etc. In order to be counterproductive and try to predict natural calamities such as forest fires, quakes, floods, cloudbursts, etc. (Bhushan and Sahoo 2020a; Han et al. 2019). Wireless mobile networks can be used for monitoring outgoing services, equipment, and nodes. It can also be used in surveillance of battlefield, atomic, biotic, and chemical attack detection. Wireless mobile networks can be used in health applications for telemonitoring of human physiological data, in telecare medicine information systems, for drug administration in hospitals, and for tracking and monitoring patients and doctors inside a hospital (Kibria et al. 2018). Figure 5.1 shows the transmission procedure of data in the form of packets in the wireless mobile network.

Fig. 5.1
A flow diagram. The data packets from the sender's side lead to modulation in the wireless channel and are transformed into estimated data packets on the receiver's side.

Transmission procedure

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Wireless mobile systems are susceptible to safety outbreaks due to the broadcast behavior of the communication medium and the sensitive nature of collected information. Security effects by some parameters of wireless mobile networks that must be addressed are resource limitations, processing limitation, limited memory and storage space, power limitation, etc. (Bhushan and Sahoo 2019a). Microcontrollers in nodes of wireless mobile networks range between 4 and 400 machine instructions per second which implement communication functions but are not sufficient to support security mechanisms. A small memory of nodes necessitates limiting the code size of security algorithms named encryption, decryption, verification, etc., (Bhushan and Sahoo 2019b) that employed in security algorithms need more processing, i.e., power consumption. And also more energy is mandatory to convey the safety-related data or overhead. Connectionless routing implies unreliable exchanges. Due to channel errors and congestion, packets may get damaged, resulting in lost or missing packets. Packets broadcasted on radio links may collide causing loss of information (Moin et al. 2021). The multi-hop routing in wireless mobile network nodes can lead to greater latency and makes it difficult to achieve synchronization. So, this causes a problem in detecting and reporting the events on time (Liu et al. 2020). Remote management makes it difficult to notice the physical interfering and physical caring concerns. Maybe a disseminated system without the management of central point makes network organization difficult (Zhao et al. 2019). Furthermore, the key inspiration of this study is as follows.

  • The work discusses the background as well as different types of wireless mobile networks and the need of securing data in the network through wireless transmission/connections.

  • The work deliberates the various challenges and issues of wireless mobile network, which comes during the transference of data.

  • The work highlights the security goals and categories of attacks, and also discussed how to protect the wireless mobile network from attacks in detail.

  • The work explores some recently proposed data related to networking and elaborates some methods to prevent an attack on a system.

  • The work redefines the inspiration for protecting data with Java to form a securing application for Securing data.

The remainder of the paper is planned as follows, section “Types of Wireless Mobile Network” defines the different types of wireless mobile networks that construct on the basis of wireless connection. Furthermore, section “Challenges and Issues in Wireless Mobile Network” discusses the various challenges and issues that occur during the formation of wireless mobile networks or when the transmission takes place. Additionally, section “Security Goals of Wireless Mobile Network” elaborates the goals of security, where confidentiality, availability, authentication, integrity, and non-repudiation have been discussed. Moreover, section “Classification of Security Attacks” describes the classification of security attacks for securing applications or systems or wireless mobile networks. This section also defines some kinds of attacks and illustrates how the attacks can affect the wireless mobile network. Furthermore, this section also deliberates the information about various detection and prevention mechanisms for protecting the network from different kinds of attacks. Lastly, section “Conclusion” brings the paper to a conclusion.

Types of Wireless Mobile Network

The wireless links are used for connection between the devices by using the medium such as microwaves, communiqué satellites, radio waves, spread spectrum technologies, free-space optical transmissions, or numerous technologies that are used in mobile networks (Lyu et al. 2019). The different types of wireless mobile networks are shown in Fig. 5.2.

Fig. 5.2
A block diagram of types of wireless networks includes PAN, LAN, MAN, WAN, MANET, GAN, aerospace network, and mobile network.

Types of wireless network

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Wireless PAN

The wireless Personal Area Networks (PAN) connect all the network and end-to-end devices to a fairly small region, usually accessible to a person. For illustration, Bluetooth radio, as well as undistinguishable infrared rays, delivers wireless PAN headset connected to a portable computer. ZigBee also supports Wireless PAN applications that include sensors and many related devices (Awais et al. 2020).

Wireless LAN

The wireless Local Area Network (LAN) joins two or more nodes as well as network devices to a short distance using a wireless dissemination technique, typically giving network access points over the internet. The use of spread-spectrum or wireless transmission technology could permit the users to navigate within the limited area and stay associated with the system. Immovable wireless technology uses point-to-point associations among computers or networks in two remote positions, usually using a devoted microwave or another ray converted into a line of sight. It is frequently used in capitals to attach the systems in two or more buildings without fixing a wireless connection (Fortino et al. 2018).

Manet

The wireless Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a wireless system that connects the node or devices based on the structure of mesh topology. Every device transmits the data packets instead of knowing other devices/nodes and every node forms a route. Ad hoc networks can “support themselves”, and automatically relocate to a depleted environment. Numerous network layer protocols are required to employ MANET, such as vector sequence tracking, associativity-based route, dynamic source route, and much more (Ayele et al. 2018).

Wireless MAN

The wireless Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) is a type of wireless network that links numerous wireless LANs to provide connectivity between two types of networks and covers the networks in a range of around thousands of kilometers or area covering two cities, for example, WiMAX (Malik et al. 2020).

Wireless WAN

The wireless Wide Area Network (WAN) often covers huge regions, like nearby villages and cities, or cities and suburbs. These systems can be used to join branch offices to companies or work as a public internet access system, for example, internet is a type of WAN, which connects people all over the world that says WAN is able to create or maintain the world largest networks easily. Wireless links among access points are generally point-to-point microwaves using parabolic vessels at 2.4 GHz band, at the place of omnidirectional horns, which are used with minor networks. The standard system consists of basic hubs, routers, gateways, access points, and relay wireless bridges. Another configuration system has spaces where each access point acts as a relay as well (Elhattab et al. 2017).

Mobile Network

It is a radio system dispersed over the world called cells, each of which is supplied with at least one immovable transceiver, known as a mobile site or base station. In this type of network, all cell uses a diverse group of radio frequencies across adjacent cells to escape any disruption. When they are put together, these cells provide radio broadcasts throughout the country (Tzanakaki and Anastasopoulos 2019).

Gan

The Global Area Network (GAN) is a network that is used to support mobile phones with a certain number of wireless LANs, satellite-covered environments, etc. It is a kind of network in which different networks or devices or transmission mediums are interconnected to cover an unlimited geographical space. The biggest challenge in mobile communication is the transfer of user communications from one location to another. The IEEE 802 project involves a series of groundless LANs (Zhao et al. 2021).

Aerospace Network

Aerospace networks are the networks that are used to communicate between spacecraft, usually in areas close to the universe. It has been giving instructional sustenance, software resolutions, and media invention facilities to both scholastic and commercial clients. An example of this type of network is the NASA space network (Liang et al. 2019).

Challenges and Issues in Wireless Mobile Network

In today's world, providing a reliable and dependable mode of communication, especially in emergencies or applications is one of the important research concerns and challenges. Some important issues and challenges in a wireless mobile network are buffer management, node discovery, forwarding of the message, security of network and data, etc., which are briefly explained below and also mentioned in Fig. 5.3.

Fig. 5.3
A diagram of challenges in wireless mobile networks includes endless communication, delay tolerance, heterogeneity, buffer management, privacy and security, quality of service, power management features, and contextual awareness, among others.

Challenges in wireless mobile network

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Information Management

Wireless mobile network is a type of environment where most of the focus is on the delivery of information to achieve this most of the routing protocols use flooding-based mechanisms. This type of protocol has a habit to load the network by transferring a huge amount of information into the network. So, to handle these issues, the authors provide various other types of protocols that are based on the forwarding approach rather than the flooding approach (Ding et al. 2018).

Endless Communication

In wireless mobile networks, communication between two devices provides the basis for interaction. The communication issue is exacerbated by an absence of prior information about the position, time, and required bandwidth. Route agreements that use the context, profile, or history of mobile users as well as all connected devices should be examined for use on mobile networks. It will be necessary to upgrade the middleware methods so that the mask can be delayed and hide the complexity of the flexible methods in the operating systems. The information obtained must be analyzed to archive, refine, and disseminate as the storage capacity and bandwidth are restricted (Shnaiwer et al. 2019).

Delay Tolerance

Effective use of Delay Tolerant Network (DTN)’s applications has been proven very useful for wireless mobile networks. Tolerance delay plays a significant role in the mobile computer as all individuals did not want to wait or waste their single minute hence, it is very essential to provide smooth communication without any kind of delay (Liu 2021).

Heterogeneity

Possibly, many types of nodes may come together automatically such as cell phones, PDs, laptops digital notebooks, sensors, cameras, and RFID devices. These devices can be maintained by a variety of communication abilities and radio signals. The interplay of communication between these pairs of different devices is the main experiment (Samanta and Misra 2018).

Contextual Awareness

It is an important key to searching/finding a secure system. Most of the content is important for people who are directly close to the source, creating a temporary, local public where they want to share. This needs of inaugurating strong and reliable momentary relationships among people and equipment. Content knowledge and profiles of devices, individuals, and applications as well as repository development strategies are needed to effectively manage the content repository. In order to share the information on social media, researchers have projected social networking sites. A social archive is a logical compilation of a device for each device that stores information that is useful to members of its social network. Given that participants are predictable to meet regularly, and data stored in a public repository can be used effectively by more members, temporary community retention can meaningfully improve system performance (Lee and Ke 2018; Kibria et al. 2018).

Buffer Management

The most important part of devices is storage or buffer space in themselves. On a mobile or movable computer, devices store the information of another person in their repository that should be carefully monitored by removing undesirable data and protecting the data usable from applications on the network’s device, such as those devices by which our peers are expected to encounter next. The content repository can be processed through other applications, content, or other methods (Wadii et al. 2019).

Power Features

Power is another important feature of the portable device, where most devices are powered by a battery. Power management is a separate issue in terms of stowage and bandwidth management. Improved data transfer on a wireless optical connector causes more power, while local data storage may incur significant energy costs in memory control (Sinha et al. 2017).

Privacy and Security

Finding security and trust between anonymous nodes in this type of network is a challenge. However, social networking structures provide the basis for improving trust and providing protection through the use of “communities” of similar devices within themselves, physically or mentally. The idea of using social networking infrastructures to improve network security is not a novelty. Actually, the works cover a few suggestions based on the use of social networks to combat email spam and to protect the networks against various kind of attacks. Conversely, the use of social networking is the complete separation of networks is a new and challenging task as, in these surroundings, security resolutions based on a central server or trusted online specialists cannot be achieved. In this case, the natural direction of the pursuit of exploitation of electronic social networks and the relationship between trust and safety is deeply ingrained in human relationships (Petrov et al. 2018).

Security Goals of Wireless Mobile Network

Wireless network is more feasible as compared to a wired one but it is very essential to offer safe and secure communication or connection between the users. There are five security goals that needed to be accomplished to conserve smooth communication in a wireless mobile network as shown in Fig. 5.4.

Fig. 5.4
A block diagram of security goals. It includes confidentiality, availability, authentication, integrity, and non-repudiation.

Goals of security

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  • Confidentiality—It refers to the protection of data sent by a device so that it becomes unreadable by an unsanctioned person or access point. Because wireless networks are open, all networks are within direct transmission range, making data retrieval simple so it is very important to keep the data confidential from the unauthorized user or device.

  • Availability—The “activeness of communication” is most essential in the network, network services should always be available when they are needed. The availability means the data, the transmission medium, as well as the node, will be available or reachable in the network for communication or connection if they are not busy in another network (Edirisinghe et al. 2021).

  • Authentication—It identifies that a network or a client is genuine or not fake and prevents parody so that any devices carrying the virus with it cannot easily connect with the genuine network or perform illegal actions. As the fake node has the identity of a genuine network or device to access the sensitive information easily, it is much needed to authenticate the user.

  • Integrity—Integrity relates to the fact that the sender's message should reach the receiver intact, with no changes or deletions. That means when the data packet which is sent by the sender to the receiver through an insecure and open transmission medium should be same without any alteration or change of a single bit in the data packet.

  • Non-repudiation—It gave the assurances to the sender that a sent message cannot deny after sending that the message or that the message was received by the intended recipient will not be deniable. It’s used to separate and identify infected access points. If Network X receives an infected message from Network Y, Network X should be able to blame Network Y and inform the other networks about it using non-repudiation (Fernando et al. 2019).

Classification of Security Attacks

The transmission medium of a wireless network is broadcast in nature. Due to this, wireless network is very sensitive to different kinds of security threats. In a wireless network, security attacks can be categorized as follows.

  • Passive versus active attacks—In passive attacks, the data travels over the network without any disrupting operations applied to transmission. Although in an active attack, information disruption, alteration, deletion, construction, etc., can disturb the normal functioning of the wireless network (Lin et al. 2020).

  • Internal versus external attacks—Internal attacks are performed inside the network by compromised networks that lie inside the network, while external attacks are performed by those networks that do not lie inside the network.

  • Stealthy versus non-stealthy attacks—The attacker tries to hide his/her identity/actions and operate quietly to disturb the network. In non-stealthy attacks, the attacker doesn’t hide his/her action/identity (Guan and Ge 2018).

  • Cryptographic versus non-cryptographic attacks—Digital signature attacks, hash collision attacks, and many more are kinds of attacks that lie under the category of cryptographic attacks. Flooding attacks, blackhole attack, etc., are those attack that lies under the category of non-cryptographic attacks (Yang and Wen 2021).

  • Attacks on different layers—Table 5.1 shows attacks, which are classified based on networking layers of the internet model. There are some attacks, which come under various layers like impersonation, replay, man-in-the-middle, etc., as shown below.

    Table 5.1 Security attacks on different layers
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Most Prevalent Attacks in Wireless Systems

There is various kind of security attacks, which are performed by the attacker to gain access and admittance in the network and harm the network as well as data. In this subsection, various security attacks are classified or stated that how they perform malicious behavior.

Denial of Service (DoS) Attack

In this attack, the attacker familiarizes himself/herself with many fake or bogus data packets in the system to affect the system conflict in the wireless server. Sometimes, the infected system may pretend as a busy network and deny communicating with others (Ashfaq et al. 2019). In this attack, many bogus requests or other kind of requests floods over the system or server to keep the network busy and to make them not able to perform any genuine task. These impact network accessibility, furthermore, the detection, as well as prevention techniques of this attack are as follows.

  • Strengthening their security status: This includes strengthening all internet-based resources to prevent compromising, installing and maintaining anti-virus software, setting up security walls designed to guard the network against DoS attacks, and following strict safety procedures to observe and control undesirable traffic (Okamura et al. 2019).

Flooding Attack

The purpose of an infected network is to deplete the resources in the network like consuming the power of the battery of the networks by flooding unnecessary requests. It is also termed a resource consumption attack or bogus information attack (Nundloll et al. 2020). Moreover, the prevention technique for flooding attacks is stated.

  • Blacklist the infected network—Every network has a threshold value in a network that is priory defined. If the network sends the RREQ request more than its threshold value, then that network gets blacklisted from the network and any request that comes from the blacklist network is simply dropped by another network (Bhushan and Sahoo 2020b).

Jamming

The main purpose of this attack is to prevent sending and reception of legitimate packets from source to destination. Sometimes, it can be performed to capture the way and gain access. In this attack, unnecessary request and response messages are flooded to jam the routes so that the functionality of the network decreases. At last, all the possible routes between networks in the network get destroyed and no communication is done, it is also called an SYN flood attack (Liu and Labeau 2021). Moreover, some of the detection and prevention techniques of this attack are as follows.

  • Anti-Jamming reinforcement system—It is used to see if there's any jamming going on. To lessen the jamming effects, it provides rate adaptation and power control measures such as ARES (A software package that allows the file to be immediately downloaded into the system) (Tsiota et al. 2019).

  • Uncoordinated Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (UDSSS)—The receiver has a certificate of the sender’s public key in this broadcast situation, but they don’t exchange the secret key. As a result, the receiver will be able to verify the request (Zhang et al. 2020).

  • Steiner Triple System and the Traversal Design (STS &TD)—These two approaches, STS and TD, are proposed to provide jamming prevention (Gautam et al. 2019).

Intervention

Radio communication can be obstructed by the invader to harm or injure the data so that it cannot reach the receiver. It happens when the user is able to access a little solid information about the network without direct access to it. The purpose of this unintentional attack is to combine the information on a single level of security in order to determine the truth that should be protected at the highest level of security (Malik and Gupta 2019).

Sleep Deprivation Attack

For the extra consumption of battery of networks, the sleep deprivation attack is done. In this, networks are enforced to continue wakeful by the invader to reduce the battery life and to shut down the networks. This attack is the most hazardous type of attack at this stage, as the malicious node makes requests to the nodes only to keep the victims awake. The victim’s nodes are therefore reserved for the network wakeful and not able to complete energy-based tasks (Bhushan et al. 2017).

Blackhole Attack

In this attack, an illusion is created by the infected network that it has the shortest way from sender to receiver. Once it is done, then all the packets coming to the infected network get to fall. If more than one infected network work in combination and try to suffer the whole network, then it is called a collaborative blackhole attack or packet dropping attack (Malik and Gautam 2019). Moreover, the detection and prevention techniques that are used to protect the network from blackhole attack and cooperative blackhole attack are as follows.

  • Prevention of a Cooperative Blackhole Attack (PCBHA)—The concept of PCBHA is to use fidelity level in networks. Initially, each network has a defaulting fidelity level, and after distribution of an RREQ, a source network waits to receive return RREPs after the neighbor networks, only that neighbor network gets selected which has an advanced reliability level and surpasses the threshold value, for passing the data packets. It is mandatory for the destination network to return an ACK message after receiving data packets. When the source network receives an ACK message from the destination network, it adds 1 to the fidelity level of the neighboring network. If no ACK response is received by the source network from the destination network, then 1 is subtracted from the fidelity level of the neighbor network which shows a possibility of a blackhole node in the network on the followed route (Heo et al. 2018).

  • Protection based on cryptography—To protect blackhole and collaborative blackhole attacks, some cryptographic techniques are also used like fingerprint (hash or hash MAC), digital signature, and other protections (Zhou et al. 2020).

  • Protocol modification—To protect blackhole and collaborative blackhole attacks, some modifications to the protocol can also be done like cross-check, degree of trust, and data routing information table (Nishanth and Mujeeb 2021).

  • Redundant route method—To prevent blackhole attack, not only one but also many routes are found from sender to receiver. The minimum number of valid routes from sender to receiver, in any case, is three as per (Kafaie et al. 2018).

Rushing Attack

In this attack, the source network sends RREQ to the destination network via some networks in between. Concurrently, another RREQ is sent to the same destination network by the attacker’s network. If the neighbor network of that destination network gets the attacker network’s request first, then that infected route is selected (route having an infected network). After that, the original request which is conducted from the source network is received by the neighbor network and will be discarded. As a result, the communication between the source network and destination network is only done via the infected network or attacker network (Sivanesh et al. 2019). Moreover, the detection technique which is used to detect the rushing attack in the network is stated as follows.

  • Secure neighbor detection—It confirms that a neighboring network falls in a maximum communication scale by introducing a delegation message which is based on the sign based on some routing table’s entries (Zhou et al. 2020).

Sybil Attack

In this attack, a network is taking over the whole network and then claims numerous individualities. Generally, it disturbs the accessibility but, on the second hand, it also impacts the rest of the goals of security. Sybil attack is a type of computer network attack where an attacker overrides the reputation of the system by creating a large number of fake identities and using them to gain unparalleled influence (Baza et al. 2022). The detection and prevention techniques for this attack are stated below.

  • Trusted certification—Every system in the network has a single identity certification which is given by the centralized authority that cannot be alterable or multiple. It is a kind of certification which is a legal document given by centralized authority to certify the individuality of both the trust and action of the trustee (Avoussoukpo et al. 2021).

  • Trusted devices—In this approach, a network card is used to provide authenticity of entities and it is mandatory for all of the entities to have a card in a network, it is a kind of certification which is a legal document given by centralized authority (Yao et al. 2019).

Sinkhole Attack

This attack is done inside a system. An invader accommodates a network inside the whole network and inaugurates an attack like packet drop, fake routing update, and modification. To detect and prevent sinkhole attacks, a mechanism is developed that considers the operation of the AODV protocol as well as the behavior of sinkhole attacks. The mechanism is divided into four phases—the initialization phase, storage phase, Iivestigation, and resumption phase (Malik et al. 2022).

Gray Hole Attack

It is a superior case of the blackhole attack. It is very similar to the blackhole attack. The only variance is blackhole attack drops all the data packets while the gray hole attack can or cannot drop the data packets. It does not have a fixed behavior. It often switches its state from infected to normal networks and vice versa (Khan et al. 2021). To protect system from this attack, we can use all the discussed detection and prevention techniques of blackhole attacks as working of both attacks are very similar.

Byzantine Attack

In this attack creating routing loops, forwarding packets through non-existing paths, or dropping attacks are performed in a byzantine attack by an infected network or group of infected networks that work in collusion (Taggu and Marchang 2019).

Jellyfish Attack

The motive of this attack is to make unwanted delays while data packets are being sent. It introduces pauses in forwarding the data packets producing high end-to-end delays. It is known as a Jellyfish attack or GTS attack and Timing attack (Deepika and Saxena 2018). The various detection and prevention techniques for jellyfish attack are as follows.

  • 2ACK—The 2ACK basic technique is based on the idea that a specific two-hop acknowledgment called 2ACK to send by the destination network to the source network just to point out that the data packet was received successfully by the destination network.

  • Credit-based systems—In that approach token or credit is used by the network, the moment it begins to send its packet in order to encourage successful transmissions (Thapar and Sharma 2020).

  • Reputation-based scheme—In this system, single networks are capable to detect misbehaving networks (such as CONFIDANT) (Yang et al. 2021).

Wormhole Attack

The data packets are caught by the invader from one place and are tunneled to another place to disorder the routing. Sometimes this attack may also affect the accessibility of the network. If the tunneling mechanism is not applied properly, all the packets may be dropped by the attacker (Prasse and Mieghem 2020). Furthermore, the detection and prevention techniques for wormhole attack are stated.

  • Clustering—The whole network is partitioned into small clusters (group of networks) containing a cluster head. In a cluster, the number of members (networks) is priory-defined. A cluster head is a leader of the cluster by has the power to transmit the information to the entire membership. There is no communication link between members, it is only done via cluster head (Yoshino et al. 2018).

  • Packet leash—Two types of leashes are used to detect and prevent wormhole attacks. The first one is a geographical leash, and another is a temporal leash. In a geographical leash, the network sends its location and transmission time before sending the data packet. When the receiver receives the data packets, it calculates the traversal time of packets just to match the information which is sent by the sender. RTT (Round trip time) and time of flight are some methods that come under the geographical leash to detect the attack. On another side, in temporal leashes, the packet is sent with a sending timestamp added by the sender, and the traveling distance of that packet is calculated by the receiver (Gul 2021)

  • Other techniques—Some other techniques can also be used to prevent this attack such as DS, Network monitoring, and GPS-based wormhole combating technique (directional antenna) (Thanuja et al. 2018).

Eavesdropping

It is the blocking and casting of an eye over data and conversations by the attacker. It disturbs the privacy of the network. It is also termed traffic analysis or sniffing attack. It is theft of data as it is transmitted to a network via a node, smartphone, or another connected device. It uses the opportunity of an unsecured network connection to access data as it is sent or received by its user. It occurs when cybercriminals steal information sent or received by a user through an insecure network. Additionally, by the usage of strong encryption techniques, we can able to mitigate this attack and can protect the system/network (Li et al. 2019).

Disclosure of Information Attack

In this type of attack, the attacker reveals information related to the network topology, confidential data, geographic position of networks, or ideal paths to actual networks in the network. It is also known as an Information leakage attack, it occurs when a website accidentally discloses the sensitive data to its users. Dependent on the framework, websites may reward all kinds of data/information for a potential invader, including data of other users, such as usernames or financial information. It occurs when the request does not adequately protect sensitive information that may eventually be disclosed to the parties who should not have access to it (Li et al. 2021).

Man-In-The-Middle Attack

The attacker sits between the sender and recipient and observes information, while transmission and theft of the essential data/information under this attack. This attack is a common name where the perpetrator puts himself in a conversation between the user and the request listener or pretends to be one of the parties, making it seem like they are exchanging common information. This attack also helps the vicious attacker, without any type of participant you see until it is too late, to break into another person’s targeted data and should not be sent at all (Khatod and Manolova 2020).

Replay Attack

It is a passive attack, in this attack, the attacker stored a message or data packet of a network and used the stored message for further communication by controlling and resending them later to access the network and perform impersonate actions (Malik 2019).

ACK Attack

Under this attack, a fake acknowledgment is sent by the hacker to the receiver, intermediate node as well sender to eavesdrop on the network. When a request is sent by the sender then an attacker takes advantage of this to send a fake acknowledgment as a response at the place of receiver or intermediate nodes. Once the fake acknowledgment is received by the sender which is exactly the same as the acknowledgment of the actual receiver hence the sender gets trapped and sends the original data as a response to the fake received acknowledgment (Boche et al. 2021).

Spoofing Attack

When an infected network/node misprints its identification to a genuine node as multiple nodes, resulting in topology changes, delays, change in data, illegal actions, and data losses. An infected system may pretend to be a valid network member after retaining the same IP address of a network member. These are known as spoofing attacks, IP spoofing attacks, and session hijacking attacks (Wu et al. 2020).

Link Spoofing Attack

In This Attack- when a fake path to non-existent network/s is built or a fake updating in the routing table is performed, then routing protocol is directly affected. It’s also called a Link spoofing attack, a fabrication attack, or a Global Positioning System (GPS) attack (Huan and Kim 2021). Hence, the detection technique that is used to protect the network from a link spoofing attack is stated.

  • Location information-based detection—Each network has GPS and a timestamp attached with it by this technique. GPS works with cryptographic methods. In the network, each network must announce its current and actual location information with the help of GPS to other networks so that every network that is present in the network becomes to know the location details of other networks in the network. The distance between two networks that pretended to be neighbors can be verified and false links may be turned down (Wang et al. 2019).

Spear-Phishing Attack

Spear-phishing is also known as email spoofing, in this, the attacker forces the victim to open his or her email to acquire access and retrieve important information. It is a malicious email attack directed at an organization or individual, seeking unauthorized access to sensitive information. It is a direct attempt to steal sensitive information such as account information or financial information from the victim, usually for malicious reasons. This is achieved by obtaining personal information from the victim such as friends, hometown, places they frequently visit, and what they have recently purchased online (Swarnalatha et al. 2021).

Repudiation Attack

Repudiation assault refers to the denial in taking part in communication activity that is the node affected by repudiation attack will continuously deny to make a connection or take part in sharing the data packets by showing them busy (Zhang et al. 2021). The two techniques proposed in the literature for protecting the network against repudiation attacks are—Create Secure Audit Trails (CSAT) and Digital Signatures (DS) (Luo et al. 2018).

Infected Code Injection

Viruses, worms, logic bombs, spyware, adware, and Trojan horses are examples of harmful programming that can target both the operating system and user application as well as the network. It’s also known as a malware attack (Bhardwaj et al. 2021). The detection or prevention technique for this attack is as follows.

  • Static code analysis—It is the most effective method of preventing harmful malware from infecting business systems. Nowadays, leading scanners can rapidly expose infected code such as anti-debugging techniques, steady information, data leakage, time bombs, rootkits, etc. (Liu et al. 2019).

Colluding Mis-Relay Attack

In a colluding mis-relay attack, instead of a single attacker, a group of attackers works together quietly to modify data packets or drop-sending packages to disrupt the network’s normal operation. When the attackers drop packets, it has an impact on the network’s availability. To detect this attack, an acknowledgment-based approach is used at the receiver’s end as well as the sender’s end (Abdalzaher et al. 2019).

Selective-Forwarding Attack

The attacker gets all data packets originating from the source and then forwards some of the data packets to the destination node that select randomly, while the remaining data packets are stolen by the attacker so that a malicious action can be performed (Gonzalez and Jung 2019).

Database Hack Attack

In a network, all the activities or data stored in the database must be properly configured but when it is configured appropriately. It can, however, be hacked if it is configured incorrectly (Gonzalez and Jung 2019). Moreover, table 5.2 presents a tabular summary of the whole paper.

Table 5.2 Security attacks in wireless mobile network
Full size table

Conclusion

The paper discussed and presented the various security issues present in mobile or wireless networks which disturb the normal functions of the network. The mobile nature of the networks makes them even more vulnerable to security attacks like DoS attack, Blackhole attack, Jamming, Flooding attack Sybil attack, Gray hole attack, IP spoofing attack, Rushing attack, Sleep deprivation attack, Wormhole attacks, etc. The paper discussed the various categories of wireless mobile networks, different challenges of wireless mobile networks, security goals, and classification of attacks into different categories on various measures. At last, the paper presented some detection and prevention of attacks as proposed by different researchers. The paper presents a comprehensive survey of the attacks on wireless mobile networks and purposed solutions. In future work, we will design a technique that can able to secure the network from different kinds of attacks.