Comprehensive Methodology for Threat Identification and Vulnerability Assessment in Ad hoc Networks

Abstract

Ad hoc networks are self-configuring wireless networks without any centralized management. These days, such networks are useful in military application owing to the ease of deployment. The inherent characteristics of these networks introduce new security threats and vulnerabilities that lead to more security attacks as compared to wired and wireless infrastructure networks. For threat identification, a hybrid threat identification methodology is proposed which combines the “Asset centric and Attacker centric” approaches. It takes into account the critical assets present in the network and the adversary capability required for compromising these assets. Further, a vulnerability assessment methodology is proposed under which the network vulnerabilities are analyzed at different levels—Host, Routing Protocol, Node Behavior, and Crypto Algorithms. The proposed methodology has been examined using two different types of scenario-emulated network and real network.