Vulnerability Assessment of Routing Protocols in MANET

Security is a weak link of network systems. The malicious usage and attacks have caused tremendous loss by impairing the functionalities of the computer networks. Among all network attacks, Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed DoS (DDoS) attacks are two of the most harmful threats to network functionality. Mobile Ad Hoc networks are even more vulnerable to these attacks. Existing MANET routing protocols, such as Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing Protocol (AODV), do not provide enough security defense capacity. AODV is inherently vulnerable to many attacks viz. authentication, availability, integrity & confidentiality attacks. Major research efforts have been taken to solve this problem. But most of the proposed solutions are not feasible or practical for the operating MANETs.