Towards a Taxonomy of MANETs Attacks: Attack Attributes-based Taxonomy (AABT)

Abstract

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) find a rapid increase of applications and interest. The vulnerabilities of MANETs make the security issue a major concern for researcher and practitioners. MANETs attacks are often described and classified differently, resulting in confusion in what a particular attack actually is and how attacks can be categorized. Generally, the purpose of attack taxonomy is to provide a useful and consistent means of classifying attacks. A well defined taxonomy will allow previous knowledge to be applied to new attacks as well as providing a structured way to view such attacks. This paper proposes a new taxonomy to MANETs attacks. The taxonomy is aimed to provide means to create attack categories, to enable highlighting similarities between attacks and to be useful in identifying attack-related detection and prevention countermeasures. The taxonomy is based on attack attributes. Every attack is characterized by a unique vector of attributes values, where each attribute define a specific attack property which may have different values. The taxonomy uses six attributes; the legitimacy of attacking node/s, the number of nodes participating in the attack, MANETs vulnerabilities utilized by the attack, the network resources exploited by the attacking node/s, the targeted victim and finally, the network security service compromised by the attack. The analysis of some well known attacks shows the capability of the proposed taxonomy in describing and categorizing these attacks as taxonomy vectors.