Security Vulnerabilities in Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks have inherently different properties than traditional wired networks. These new characteristics present different security vulnerabilities and this paper provides a detailed classification of these threats. Threats exist to a mobile ad hoc network both from external nodes unauthorised to participate in the mobile ad hoc networks, and from internal nodes, which have the authorisation credentials to participate in the mobile ad hoc network. Internal nodes giving rise to threats can be further divided according to their behaviour — failed, badly failed, selfish and malicious nodes. Failed and selfish nodes are those which do not perform certain operations that the protocol specifies that they should, the former due to some unforeseen failure and the latter due to selfishness to conserve power. Badly failed nodes may perform operations incorrectly, introducing false and misleading information into the network. Malicious nodes may deliberately disrupt the network using a variety of attacks. All categories of node behaviour should be considered when designing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks.

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