The Impact of Mobility Patterns on MANET Vulnerability to DDoS Attacks

摘要

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a multi-hop, wireless, self-configuring network that can be formed without the need of any pre-established infrastructure or centralized administration. All nodes in the network act at the same time as hosts and packet-forwarding routers. Wireless links, node mobility and lack of central administration make MANETs far more vulnerable to security attacks than conventional networks [1, 2]. Taxonomy and comprehensive survey of MANET security attacks can be found in the literature [2, 3]. In a denial of service (DoS) attack, legitimate users are prevented from access to services or network resources. DoS attacks can be launched at any layer of the protocol stack causing physical jamming, disconnection, and malfunction of routing, transport and application protocols. The attacks become extremely dangerous and hard to prevent if a group of attackers coordinate in DoS. This type of attack is called distributed DoS (DDoS) attack. When a DDoS attack occurs in MANET, the attacker actually compromises a number of mobile nodes, which can follow different mobile patterns and have different speeds.