Detection and Prevention of ARP Spoofing Attacks on Mobile Ad Hoc Networks A Thesis Presented

Abstract

A Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is a convenient wireless infrastructure which presents many advantages in network settings. However, such networks are vulnerable to face lots of challenges due to the relatively more flexible setup. As opposed to the wired infrastructure, such networks are more susceptible to attacks of various types. This is due to the non-centralized nature of their overall architecture. Spoofing, session hijacking and man-in-the-middle attacks can be taken as an example for such attacks. Each of the-so-far identified attack types have been thoroughly tackled by different researchers in the past decades. The focus of this particular work was on the ARP spoofing attacks and by proposing an algorithm which implements the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol it was possible to detect and prevent attacks on MANETs. It was intended to help mitigate the damage that malicious nodes cause on the network once having access to it with a falsified identity. The algorithm proposed in this work introduced a barrier in the form of lease files to prevent unnecessary updates to the ARP table of each node. Whenever a malicious node joins the network, the nearby node detected that it was an attacker and got it blacklisted from the network. This implementation played the role of securing every ARP cache entry. The simulation was made using the OPNET network simulator. It is highly expected that the findings of this paper would present a viable way of securing MANETs from spoofing attacks and opens the door for researchers who intend to expand the algorithm as to reach out multiple MANETs in a single scenario.