Detection and Prevention of Routing Intrusions in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

There has been a tremendous interest in recent years in the design of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) because of their dynamic topology, self-organization and ease of deployment. However, the lack of security in their routing protocols make MANETs vulnerable to a variety of routing intrusions that can compromise the data or the entire network itself. This paper presents a novel scheme for the detection and prevention of intrusions on the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol for MANETs. This scheme is patched to the OLSR implementation and runs independently on each MANET node. The mechanism verifies specifications in control messages sent by intruder nodes in the network and addresses a unique vulnerability in the implementation of the OLSR protocol. Furthermore, this technique helps each MANET node maintain a reliable routing table which is very important to prevent intrusions. Keywords-mobile ad hoc networks, wireless security, routing protocol security, intrusion detection and prevention.