A comprehensive analysis of DoS attacks in Mobile Adhoc Networks

Mobile Adhoc NETworks (MANETs) have gained popularity in both research and industrial domains due to their on-demand ad-hoc nature, easy deployment and absence of any central authority for routing. However, MANETs are susceptible to an array of attacks, primarily because of their adhoc and decentralized nature. Most of these attacks are targeted at disrupting the routing of control and data packets, thereby rendering MANETs insecure and unusable. Denial of Service (DoS) attack is a suite of attacks consisting of attacks like Blackhole, Grayhole attack etc. in which the network traffic is captured and forwarded to a malicious node or a group of collaborating malicious nodes in the network so as to hamper legitimate communications in the network. The scope of this paper is to study the effects of Blackhole, Grayhole, Rushing and Sleep Deprivation attacks in Adhoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) based MANETs. Various performance metrics have been used to study the effects of different DoS attacks in MANETs and a comprehensive analysis is presented. NS-2.35 has been used extensively to simulate these attacks.