A Survey on Protocols & Attacks in MANET Routing

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a dynamic wireless network that can be formed without any pre-existing infrastructure in which each node can act as a router. MANET has no clear line of defense, so, it is accessible to both legitimate network users and malicious attackers. In the presence of malicious nodes, one of the main challenges in MANET is to design the robust security solution that can protect MANET from various routing attacks. Different mechanisms have been proposed using various cryptographic techniques to countermeasure the routing attacks against MANET. However, these mechanisms are not suitable for MANET resource constraints, i.e., limited bandwidth and battery power, because they introduce heavy traffic load to exchange and verifying keys. In this paper, the current security issues in MANET are investigated. Particularly, we have examined different routing attacks, such as flooding, blackhole, link spoofing, wormhole, and colluding misrelay attacks, as well as existing solutions to protect MANET protocols.