A Survey on Attacks and Countermeasures in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Security is an essential service for wired and wireless network communications. The success of mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) strongly depends on people’s confidence in its security. However, the characteristics of MANET pose both challenges and opportunities in achieving security goals, such as confidentiality, authentication, integrity, availability, access control, and non-repudiation. We provide a survey on attacks and countermeasures in MANET in this paper. The countermeasures are features or functions that reduce or eliminate security vulnerabilities and attacks. First, we give an overview of attacks according to the protocols stacks, and to security attributes and mechanisms. Then we present preventive approaches following the order of the layered protocol stacks. We also put forward an overview of MANET intrusion detection systems (IDS), which are reactive approaches to thwart attacks and used as a second line of defense.