Network Layer Attacks and Defense Mechanisms in MANETS- A Survey

The foremost concerned security issue in mobile ad hoc networks is to protect the network layer from malicious attacks, thereby identifying and preventing malicious nodes. A unified security solution is in very much need for such networks to protect both route and data forwarding operations in the network layer. Without any appropriate security solution, the malicious nodes in the network can readily act to function as routers. This will solely disturb the network operation from correct delivering of the packets, like the malicious nodes can give stale routing updates or drop all the packets passing through them. In this paper a study that will through light on such attacks in MANETS is presented. The paper also focuses on different security aspects of network layer and discusses the effect of the attacks in detail through a survey of approaches used for security purpose.