Design and implementation of a testbed for the security assessment of MANETs

Abstract

A MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork) is a self-configuring network of mobile devices connected by wireless links. Given its structure, a MANET has no clear line of defence, so it is accessible to both legitimate network users and malicious attackers. For this reason, MANETs are vulnerable to security attacks, mainly related to the poisoning of the routing protocols. The focus of this paper is two-folded, on one hand it presents a survey of the most significant attacks towards MANETs and on the other hand it details the design and implementation of an experimental testbed for assessing the security of a MANET, by allowing to perform the described attacks. The obtained results have shown that, in some cases, the purely theoretically described attacks presented in the literature, are in fact not realisable because of some "real world" operation details left unconsidered in the original paper. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.