MIRA: Misleading Routing Attack in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

The growth of laptops, personal digital assistant (PDA) and 802.11/Wi-Fi wireless networking have made mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) a popular research topic recently. Due to the flexible deployment nature and the lack of fixed infrastructure, MANETs suffer from varieties of security attacks. In this paper, we propose the misleading routing attack (MIRA), which is different from the well known gray/black hole attacks, in which a node is relaying the coming packets and not dropping them. MIRA attack aims to delay the packet as much as possible so as to let the source node time out before it receives the acknowledgment. Also it aims to overload the network by increasing the number of unexpected routing packets generated in the network. Our simulation results show that the existence of an adversary in the network launching a misleading routing attack will degrade packet transmissions in the network and increasing the number of lost packets as well as the retransmissions at the sender.