Attack Injection to Support the Evaluation of Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

The increasing emergence of mobile computing devices seamlessly providing wireless communication capabilities opens a wide range of new application domains for ad hoc networks. However, the sensitivity of ad hoc routing protocols to malicious faults (attacks) limits in practice their confident use in commercial products. This requires not only practical means to enforce the security of these protocols, but also approaches to evaluate their behaviour in the presence of attacks. Our previous contribution to the evaluation of ad hoc networks has been focused on the definition of an approach for injecting grey hole attacks in real (non-simulated) ad hoc networks. This paper relies on the use of this methodology to evaluate (i) three different implementations of a proactive ad hoc routing protocol, named OLSR, and (ii) two ad hoc routing protocols of different nature, one proactive (OLSR) and one reactive (AODV). Reported results have proven useful to extend the applicability of attack injection methodologies for evaluation beyond the mere assessment of the robustness of ad hoc routing protocols.