Alleviating malicious insider attacks in MANET using a multipath on-demand security mechanism

MANET is a family of ad hoc networks that spans a huge spectrum of other networking paradigms such as WMN, WSN, and VANET etc. There is a dire need for strengthening the base of all these networks from the security point of view. The vulnerability of MANET towards the attacks is huge as compared to its wired counterparts. MANETs are vulnerable to attacks because of the unique characteristics which they exhibit like the absence of central authority, usage of wireless links, dynamism in topology, shared media, constrained resources, etc. The ramification being that the security needs of MANETs become absolutely different than the ones which exist in the customary networks. One of the basal vulnerabilities of MANETs comes from their peer to peer architecture which is completely open wherein the mobile nodes act as routers, the medium of communication is open making it reachable to both the legitimate users of the network as well as the malicious nodes. Consequently, there is a bankruptcy of clear line of defense from the perspective of security design. This in turn implies that any node which may even be authentic can enter the network and affect its performance by dropping the packets instead of forwarding them. The occurrences of the attacks of this type in ad hoc networks result in the situation where even the standard routing protocols do not provide the required security. The proposed solutions in literature such as SAODV, ARAN, and SEAODV all provide authentication and encryption based solutions to these attacks. But, the attack on availability which is the most common and easiest of them all cannot be avoided by the authentication and encryption because even the authentic user can be the attacker. Also, the encryption cannot be helpful to prevent such attacks. Therefore, in such a situation if a proper solution is not provided the entire MANET operation will get crippled. The main aim of this paper is to guarantee a security solution which provides defense against these attacks. To achieve this, a Multipath On-demand security Mechanism, called Secure Multipath Ad hoc On-demand Distance vector routing protocol (SMAODV), is presented which eliminates the malicious nodes from the network thereby preventing MANETs from the effects of such malicious nodes.