A Robust Approach to Detect and Prevent Network Layer Attacks in MANETS

A dynamic wireless network that is formed without any pre-existing infrastructure, in which every node can act as a router is called a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). Since MANETS has not got clear cut security provisions, it is accessible to any of the authorized network users and malicious attackers. The greatest challenge for the MANETS is to come with a robust security solution even in the presence of malicious nodes, so that MANET can be protected from various routing attacks. Several countermeasures have been proposed for these routing attacks in MANETS using various cryptographic techniques. But most of these mechanisms are not considerably suitable for the resource constraints, i.e., bandwidth limitation and battery power, since they results in heavy traffic load for exchanging and verification of keys. In this paper, a new semantic security solution is provided, which suits for the different MANET constraints and also is robust in nature, since it is able to identify and prevent four routing attacks parallelly. The experimental analysis shows the identification and prevention of the four attacks parallelly I.e., packet dropping, message tampering, black hole attack and gray hole attack.