Man-in-the-Middle Attacks in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs): Analysis and Evaluation

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are being used more and more in a variety of fields, including the environment, energy efficiency, smart transportation, intelligent agriculture, and in Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems. They are also anticipated to play an increasingly significant role in the future of the Internet due to the strong evolution of wireless technology in recent years. Nevertheless, this inter-node communication is vulnerable to various security attacks such as Man–In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks, which are considered to be the main challenge in MANETs. This happens when a harmful node intercepts data shared by legal nodes. Therefore, the main goal of this work is to investigate the impact of attackers’ strategies to execute MITM assaults in MANETs, such as message-delayed and message-dropped assaults. The output of this work shows that these assaults have a severe impact on legal entities in MANETs as the network experiences a high number of compromised messages as well as high E2ED and PLD. Finally, by using symmetry or asymmetry cryptographies, our proposal will avoid MITM attacks that intercept the communication between legal nodes.