A Review of ‘MANET’s Security Aspects and Challenges’

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ABSTRACT
Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of
communication devices or nodes that wish to communicate
without any fixed infrastructure and pre-determined
organization of available links. The nodes in MANET
themselves are responsible for dynamically discovering other
nodes to communicate. Although the ongoing trend is to adopt
ad hoc networks for commercial uses due to their certain
unique properties, the main challenge is the vulnerability to
security attacks. A number of challenges like open
peer-to-peer network architecture, stringent resource
constraints, shared wireless medium, dynamic network
topology etc. are posed in MANET.



INTRODUCTION
A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a system of wireless
mobile nodes that dynamically self-organize in arbitrary and
temporary network topologies. People and vehicles can thus
be internetworked in areas without a pre-existing
communication infrastructure or when the use of such
infrastructure requires wireless extension. In the mobile ad
hoc network, nodes can directly communicate with all the
other nodes within their radio ranges; whereas nodes that are
not in the direct communication range use intermediate
node(s) to communicate with each other. In these two
situations, all the nodes that have participated in the
communication automatically form a wireless network,
therefore this kind of wireless network can be viewed as
mobile ad hoc network.


MANET’S SECURITY SERVICES
A MANET is a network consisting of a collection of nodes
capable of communicating with each other without help from
infrastructure of the network. There are mainly five security
services:



LAYERS INVOLVES IN MANET
APPLICATION LAYER
Detecting and preventing virus, worms, malicious codes,
application abuses.
Transport Layer:-Authentication and securing end-to end
communications through data encryption.
Link Layer:-Protecting the wireless MAC protocol and
providing page link layer security support.
Physical Layer: Providing signal jamming denial of service
attacks.