Skip to content

JA5. Wireless Routing Protocols Security Threats

Statement

Wireless routing protocols play a crucial role in connecting devices, but they also come with a number of security risks. Your assignment is to list at least 5 possible security threats (vulnerabilities) in wireless routing protocol and briefly discuss any two of them.

NOTE: Your submission should not be more than 300 words.

Answer

In traditional networks, there are dedicated nodes to provide support for essential functions like packet routing, forwarding, and networking management. In ad-hoc, networks such tasks will be performed by all available nodes.

With dedicated nodes for network management, these nodes can have special security measures that differ from normal nodes; however, in ad-hoc networks, all nodes are equal and have the same security measures, thus the security of such networks is more challenging as every node can be a potential threat, and balancing performance and security gets more complicated.

There are two main types of attacks (Kalime & Sagar, 2020):

  • Control traffic attacks: affect control packets and routing tables; this includes wormhole, hello flood, bogus, rushing, sybil, and blackmail attacks.
  • Data traffic attacks: affect the data packets; this includes black-hole, cooperated black-hole, gray-hole, and jellyfish attacks.

We will briefly discuss the black-hole and gray-hole attacks.

The black-hole attack involves an infected node reporting itself as having the shortest path to the destination, accepting all traffic, reporting itself as ready to forward packets; and when the packets are received, it drops them (Elahe, Iraj, & Oluwatobi, 2016).

The gray-hole attack is a variation of the black-hole attack, where the infected node drops a selective portion of the packets; this attack can be time-based or source/destination-based, that is, dropping packets from a specific source or to a specific destination or at a specific time; this attack is harder to detect than black-hole attacks as the node works sometimes (Dixit, Krishna, & Joshi, 2015).

Word Count: 253.

References