A Study of On-Off Attack Models for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

The security of mobile wireless ad hoc networks is a multifaceted topic which in recent years has been the focus of much interest in the research community. While many security issues in these networks can be addressed by protocol design, wireless nodes have inherent physical vulnerabilities that can be exploited by attackers to cause disruptions in network traffic. The nature of these exposures is such that there is little that can be done to eliminate them leaving the network open to denial of service and reduction of quality attacks. It is essential that the impact of such attacks is well-understood before wireless ad hoc networks are used in mission-critical applications. This paper is a step in this risk analysis as our experiments quantify the effects of attacks that exploit physical vulnerabilities. Our contributions in this paper are two fold. First, we introduce a general model that can be used to characterize a physical attack as an on-off process and then we apply this model to two specific attack scenarios. Second, we present the results of a simulation study with these two attack scenarios in the context of a mesh of network nodes using the IEEE 802.11 standard and the AODV routing protocol