Understanding Dynamic Denial of Service Attacks in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), denial of service (DoS) attacks not only consume the scarce system resources, such as bandwidth, battery energy, or CPU cycles, but also isolate legitimate users from a network. Therefore, DoS attacks may impact the network connectivity seriously and may further undermine the networking functions, such as control and data message delivery. In this paper, we will present a deep insight into DoS attacks and their impacts on MANETs. First, we analyze the node isolation problem resulting from DoS attacks and derive the probability of node isolation, which shows that the DoS attack exploiting fraudulent routing messages, such as BlackHole attack, impacts the connectivity much severer than other attacks. Second, we notice that the node mobility and potential attack propagation have hardly been considered in the previous DoS attack studies; therefore, we introduce a dynamic DoS attack in this paper. The dynamic DoS attack is characterized in exploiting the node mobility, dynamic power control, and compromised nodes to spread new DoS attacks dynamically. Further, we provide an analytical study on the properties of this new DoS attack, and explain its potential devastating impact on the connectivity of MANETs