A novel taxonomy of MANET attacks

The vulnerabilities of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) make it subject to a large number of attacks. In order to understand the nature and behavior of such attacks, many classification schemes and taxonomies to MANET attacks have been proposed. This paper proposes a new taxonomy to MANETs attacks. The taxonomy is aimed to provide a consistent means of classifying attacks, as well as allowing previous knowledge to be applied to new attacks and providing a structured way to view such attacks. The taxonomy is based on attack attributes. Every attack is characterized by a unique vector of attribute values, where each attribute defines a specific attack property which may have different values. The taxonomy uses six attributes; the legitimacy of attacking node/s, the number of nodes participating in the attack, MANETs vulnerabilities utilized by the attack, the network resources exploited by the attacking node/s, the targeted victim and finally, the network security service compromised by the attack. The analysis of some well known attacks shows the capability of the proposed taxonomy in describing and categorizing these attacks as taxonomy vectors.