Analysis of DoS Attacks at MAC Layer in Mobile Adhoc Networks

—Wireless network security has received tremendous attention due to the vulnerabilities exposed in the open communication medium. The most common wireless Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is IEEE 802.11, which assumes all the nodes in the network are cooperative. However, nodes may purposefully misbehave in order to disrupt network performance, obtain extra bandwidth and conserve resources. These MAC layer misbehaviours can lead to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks which can disrupt the network operation. There is a lack of comprehensive analysis of MAC layer misbehaviour driven DoS attacks for the IEEE 802.11 protocol. This research studied possible MAC layer DoS attack strategies that are driven by the MAC layer malicious/selfish nodes and investigates the performance of the IEEE 802.11 protocol. Such DoS attacks caused by malicious and selfish nodes violating backoff timers associated with the protocol. The experimental and analytical approach evaluates several practical MAC layer backoff value manipulation and the impact of such attacks on the network performance and stability in MANETs. The simulation results show that introducing DoS attacks at MAC layer could significantly affect the network throughput and data packet collision rate. This paper concludes that DoS attacks with selfish/malicious intend can obtain a larger throughput by denying well-behaved nodes to obtain deserved throughput, also DoS attacks with the intend of complete destruction of the network can succee

A Lightweight and Attack Resistant Authenticated Routing Protocol for Mobile Adhoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks, by attacking the corresponding routing protocol, an attacker can easily disturb the operations of the network. For ad hoc networks, till now many secured routing protocols have been proposed which contains some disadvantages. Therefore security in ad hoc networks is a controversial area till now. In this paper, we proposed a Lightweight and Attack Resistant Authenticated Routing Protocol (LARARP) for mobile ad hoc networks. For the route discovery attacks in MANET routing protocols, our protocol gives an effective security. It supports the node to drop the invalid packets earlier by detecting the malicious nodes quickly by verifying the digital signatures of all the intermediate nodes. It punishes the misbehaving nodes by decrementing a credit counter and rewards the well behaving nodes by incrementing the credit counter. Thus it prevents uncompromised nodes from attacking the routes with malicious or compromised nodes. It is also used to prevent the denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The efficiency and effectiveness of LARARP are verified through the detailed simulation studies.Comment: 14 Pages, IJWM

Resilient Misbehaviour Detection MAC Protocol (MD-MAC) for Distributed Wireless Networks

Chaminda Alocious, Hannan Xiao, B. Christianson, 'Resilient Misbehaviour Detection MAC Protocol (MD-MAC) for Distributed Wireless Networks' paper presented at the 2016 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (IEEE WCNC). Doha, Qatar. 3-6 April 2016Wireless network security requirements are becoming more important and critical. The modern network security architectures require more attention to provide security in each network layer. This will require understanding of protocol vulnerabilities in existing protocol architectures. However, providing security requirements are not just limited to confidentiality and integrity, also availability and fairness are important security elements. IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is one of the most common standard in modern day networks and has been designed without a consideration for providing security protection at MAC layer. IEEE 802.11 assumes all the nodes in the network are cooperative. However, nodes may purposefully misbehave in order to obtain extra bandwidth, conserve resources and disrupt network performance. This research proposes a Misbehaviour Detection MAC protocol (MD-MAC) to address the problematic scenarios of MAC layer misbehaviours, which takes a novel approach to detect misbehaviours in Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs). The MD-MAC modifies the CSMA/CA protocol message exchange and uses verifiable backoff value generation mechanism with an incorporated trust model which is suitable for distributed networks. The MD-MAC protocol has been implemented and evaluated in ns2, simulation results suggest that the protocol is able to detect misbehaving wireless nodes in a distributed network environment

Intrusion Detection System for Platooning Connected Autonomous Vehicles

The deployment of Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) requires secure wireless communication in order to ensure reliable connectivity and safety. However, this wireless communication is vulnerable to a variety of cyber atacks such as spoofing or jamming attacks. In this paper, we describe an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) based on Machine Learning (ML) techniques designed to detect both spoofing and jamming attacks in a CAV environment. The IDS would reduce the risk of traffic disruption and accident caused as a result of cyber-attacks. The detection engine of the presented IDS is based on the ML algorithms Random Forest (RF), k-Nearest Neighbour (k-NN) and One-Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM), as well as data fusion techniques in a cross-layer approach. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the proposed IDS is the first in literature that uses a cross-layer approach to detect both spoofing and jamming attacks against the communication of connected vehicles platooning. The evaluation results of the implemented IDS present a high accuracy of over 90% using training datasets containing both known and unknown attacks

Wireless Heterogeneous Networks and Next Generation Internet

The recent advances in wireless access technologies as well as the increasing number of mobile applications have made Wireless Internet a reality. A wide variety of bandwidth demanding services including high speed data delivery and multimedia communication have been materialized through the convergence of the next generation Internet and heterogeneous wireless networks. However, providing even higher bandwidth and richer applications necessitates a fundamental understanding of wireless Internet architecture and the interactions between heterogeneous users. Consequently, fundamental advances in many concepts of the wireless Internet are required for the ultimate goal of communication anytime anywhere. This special issue of the ACM Mobile Networks and Applications Journal is dedicated to the recent advances in the area of Wireless Internet. We accepted 10 papers out of 59 submissions from all over the world with a 17% acceptance rate. Papers describing management schemes, protocols, models, evaluation methods, and experimental studies of Wireless Internet are included in this special issue to provide a broad view of recent advances in this field

Security Issues in Manet and Counter-Measures

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) are self-configuring networks of mobile nodes connected by wireless links. These nodes are able to move randomly and organize themselves and thus, the network's wireless architecture change rapidly and unpredictably. MANETs are usually utilized in situations of emergency for temporary operations or when there are no resources to set up elaborate networks. Mobile Ad-hoc Networks operate in the absence of any fixed infrastructure, which makes them easy to deploy, at the same time however, due to the absence of any fixed infrastructure, it becomes difficult to make use of the existing routing techniques for network services, and this poses a number of challenges in ensuring the security of the communication network, something that is not easily done as many of the demands of network security conflict with the demands of mobile networks due to the nature of the mobile devices (e.g. low power consumption, low processing load). Most of the ad-hoc routing protocols that address security issues rely on implicit trust relationships to route packets among participating nodes. Apart from security objectives like authentication, availability, confidentiality, and integrity, the ad-hoc routing protocols should also address location confidentiality, cooperation fairness and absence of traffic diversion. In this paper we attempt to survey security issues faced by the mobile ad-hoc network environment and provide a classification of the various security mechanisms. We also analyzed the respective strengths and vulnerabilities of the existing routing protocols and proposed a broad and comprehensive frame-work that can provide a tangible solution