A Survey of Mobile Ad Hoc Network Attacks

Security is an essential requirement in mobile ad hoc network (MANETs). Compared to wired networks, MANETs are more vulnerable to security attacks due to the lack of a trusted centralized authority and limited resources. Attacks on ad hoc networks can be classified as passive and active attacks, depending on whether the normal operation of the network is disrupted or not. In this paper, we are describing the all prominent attacks described in literature in a consistent manner to provide a concise comparison on attack types. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that studies all the existing attacks on MANETs