ABSTRACT
As discussed in the preceding chapters, a wireless ad-hoc network (WAN) is characterized by its infrastructure-less behavior. Communication between the nodes constituting the WAN is purely on the basis of cooperation and mutual trust. In Chapter 3 it was discussed that WAN works in a completely distributed and decentralized environment. The performance of WAN solely depends on the security and trustworthiness of the nodes in the network. Due to the above-said features, WAN is vulnerable to a wide variety of attacks that target the weakness of WAN [6, 7]. Ad-hoc routing protocols in
4.1 Introduction 95 4.2 Security Attacks on WAN 96
4.2.1 Passive Attacks 96 4.2.2 Active Attacks 97 4.2.3 External Attacks 97 4.2.4 Internal Attacks 97
4.3 Layer-Specific Attacks 97 4.3.1 Network Layer Attacks 97 4.3.2 Transport Layer Attacks 99 4.3.3 Application Layer Attacks 100 4.3.4 Multilayer Attacks 101
4.4 Blackhole Attack 102 4.5 Wormhole Attack 104 4.6 Denial-of-Service Attack 106 4.7 Conclusion 107 References 108
WAN, such as dynamic source routing (DSR) and ad-hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) [15], are prone to some specific kinds of attacks, like blackhole [28], Byzantine [4], and wormhole [2]. Dayto-day demand of wireless networking is increasing in confidential data handling. This is the reason that routing security is one of the hot research areas. As per the International Organization for Standardization/ Open Systems Interconnection (ISO/ OSI) model, the network conceives of a layer architecture. Each layer performs different functions. On the basis of the distinct functionalities of the layers, the attacking techniques also differ. In this chapter, first a categorization of attacks is done, depending on the attacking techniques and the attacker’s location. This is followed by a description of different layer-specific attacks. A more detailed description of some attacks that are considered to be more threatening than others is included in the last part of this chapter. Some preventive approaches are described in Chapters 5 to 7 of this book.
