Attacks and Defenses of Routing Mechanisms in Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

An ad hoc or a sensor network is composed of a collection of wireless nodes. A node can only communicate with other nodes within its limited transmission range. To facilitate communication between two nodes without a direct communication link, routing protocols must be developed to support multi-hop communication. Although many routing protocols have been proposed for ad hoc and sensor networks, most of them assume that other nodes are trustable and thus do not consider the security and attack issues. To assure a source node of finding a route to its destination, most routing protocols try to invite all available nodes to participate in the routing mechanism. This provides a lot of opportunities for attackers to destroy the routing mechanism. In this chapter, we briefly introduce some existing routing protocols, discuss the weaknesses of these protocols and possible types of attacks, and provide a comprehensive survey of recent research on defense approaches to these attacks.