Securing a mobile ad hoc NETwork against the man in the middle attack
Ryma Abass, Aimable Habyarimana, Karim Tamine · International Journal Artificial Intelligent and Informatics · 2022
Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANET) are a special kind of wireless net- works where there is neither centralized authority nor pre-existing infrastructure. Hence, in such situation, authenticating nodes becomes a challenging task. This is even more true that some nodes may be tempted by spoofing other nodes identity in order to gain some rights and privileges. In such context, a protocol based on keys exchange such as Diffie-Hellman can be used. However, even such protocol is vulnerable to impersonation attack e.g. the Man in the Middle (MIM) attack. The main objective of this work is then, to evaluate the impact of a MIM attack on the context of MANET and to propose a security solution to such situation. This is done by (1) estimating the needed ratio of attackers to achieve a MIM attack in a given MANET and (2) proposing a security process based on the well known Diffie-Helman protocol.