Investigating Open Issues in Swarm Intelligence for Mitigating Security Threats in MANET

The area of Mobile Adhoc Network (MANET) has being a demanded topic of research for more than a decade because of its attractive communication features associated with various issues. This paper primarily discusses on the security issues, which has been still unsolved after abundant research work. The paper basically stresses on the potential features of Swarm Intelligence (SI) and its associated techniques to mitigate the security issues. Majority of the previous researches based on SI has used Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) or Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) extensively. Elaborated discussion on SI with respect to trust management, authentication, and attack models are made with support of some of the recent studies done in same area. The paper finally concludes by discussing the open issues and problem identification of the review

Literature Survey of Security Enhancement in MANET Routing Protocols of WLANs

A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is an autonomous collection of mobile users that communicate over relatively bandwidth constrained wireless links. One of the main issues in such networks is performance- in a dynamically changing topology; the nodes are expected to be power-aware due to the bandwidth constrained network. Another issue in such networks is security - since every node participates in the operation of the network equally, Malicious nodes are difficult to detect. There are several applications of mobile ad hoc networks such as disaster recovery operations, battle field communications, etc. The most active research area under MANET routing protocol is security. MANETs have certain unique characteristics that make them vulnerable to several types of attacks. Since they are deployed an open environment where all nodes co-operate in forwarding the packets in the network, Malicious nodes are difficult to detect

Secure Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to the service providers. Unlike traditional Wi-Fi networks, with each access point (AP) connected to the wired network, in WMNs only a subset of the APs are required to be connected to the wired network. The APs that are connected to the wired network are called the Internet gateways (IGWs), while the APs that do not have wired connections are called the mesh routers (MRs). The MRs are connected to the IGWs using multi-hop communication. The IGWs provide access to conventional clients and interconnect ad hoc, sensor, cellular, and other networks to the Internet. However, most of the existing routing protocols for WMNs are extensions of protocols originally designed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and thus they perform sub-optimally. Moreover, most routing protocols for WMNs are designed without security issues in mind, where the nodes are all assumed to be honest. In practical deployment scenarios, this assumption does not hold. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of security issues in WMNs and then particularly focuses on secure routing in these networks. First, it identifies security vulnerabilities in the medium access control (MAC) and the network layers. Various possibilities of compromising data confidentiality, data integrity, replay attacks and offline cryptanalysis are also discussed. Then various types of attacks in the MAC and the network layers are discussed. After enumerating the various types of attacks on the MAC and the network layer, the chapter briefly discusses on some of the preventive mechanisms for these attacks.Comment: 44 pages, 17 figures, 5 table

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

Collaboration Enforcement In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) have attracted great research interest in recent years. Among many issues, lack of motivation for participating nodes to collaborate forms a major obstacle to the adoption of MANETs. Many contemporary collaboration enforcement techniques employ reputation mechanisms for nodes to avoid and penalize malicious participants. Reputation information is propagated among participants and updated based on complicated trust relationships to thwart false accusation of benign nodes. The aforementioned strategy suffers from low scalability and is likely to be exploited by adversaries. To address these problems, we first propose a finite state model. With this technique, no reputation information is propagated in the network and malicious nodes cannot cause false penalty to benign hosts. Misbehaving node detection is performed on-demand; and malicious node punishment and avoidance are accomplished by only maintaining reputation information within neighboring nodes. This scheme, however, requires that each node equip with a tamper-proof hardware. In the second technique, no such restriction applies. Participating nodes classify their one-hop neighbors through direct observation and misbehaving nodes are penalized within their localities. Data packets are dynamically rerouted to circumvent selfish nodes. In both schemes, overall network performance is greatly enhanced. Our approach significantly simplifies the collaboration enforcement process, incurs low overhead, and is robust against various malicious behaviors. Simulation results based on different system configurations indicate that the proposed technique can significantly improve network performance with very low communication cost

Reputation-Based Internet Protocol Security: A Multilayer Security Framework for Mobil Ad Hoc Networks

This research effort examines the theory, application, and results for a Reputation-based Internet Protocol Security (RIPSec) framework that provides security for an ad-hoc network operating in a hostile environment. In RIPSec, protection from external threats is provided in the form of encrypted communication links and encryption-wrapped nodes while internal threats are mitigated by behavior grading that assigns reputations to nodes based on their demonstrated participation in the routing process. Network availability is provided by behavior grading and round-robin multipath routing. If a node behaves faithfully, it earns a positive reputation over time. If a node misbehaves (for any number of reasons, not necessarily intentional), it earns a negative reputation. Each member of the MANET has its own unique and subjective set of Reputation Indexes (RI) that enumerates the perceived reputation of the other MANET nodes. Nodes that desire to send data will eliminate relay nodes they perceive to have a negative reputation during the formulation of a route. A 50-node MANET is simulated with streaming multimedia and varying levels of misbehavior to determine the impact of the framework on network performance. Results of this research were very favorable. Analysis of the simulation data shows the number of routing errors sent in a MANET is reduced by an average of 52% when using RIPSec. The network load is also reduced, decreasing the overall traffic introduced into the MANET and permitting individual nodes to perform more work without overtaxing their limited resources. Finally, throughput is decreased due to larger packet sizes and longer round trips for packets to traverse the MANET, but is still sufficient to pass traffic with high bandwidth requirements (i.e., video and imagery) that is of interest in military networks