An Extensible Environment for Evaluating Secure MANET

Developing and evaluating secure MANET (mobile adhoc networks) in real systems is a complex process that involves careful design of attack test cases and security countermeasures, as well as meaningful performance measurements to evaluate both the impact of attacks and the performance of security solutions. It is desirable to have a development and testing environment that can automate this process. In this paper, we propose a software framework for such an environment and describe a system implementation in the secure MANET routing domain. This environment includes the following three major features. First, the environment is built upon a wireless network emulation tool to support repeatable experimentation. Second, it adds an attack emulation layer with necessary API for easy development and execution of attack test cases. Third, the extensible attack library includes a full set of basic attacks at its core and a way to compose complex attacks from the atomic elements. To demonstrate the usefulness of this tool, we show the development of an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) as a case study. Our successful experience confirms that the platform can greatly facilitate the development of security solutions on MANET.