Potential Security Attacks on Wireless Networks and their Countermeasure

The security of wireless networks has been a constant topic in the recent years. With the advance of wireless networks, building reliable and secured communication is becoming extremely important. Wireless security is a mechanism of preventing unauthorized access or damage to computers using wireless networks. A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a self-organizing system of mobile nodes that communicate with each other through wireless links with no fixed infrastructure or centralized administration. This paper presents potential security attacks on Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol and their countermeasure. IETF standardized AODV and considered as one of the most popular and promising on-demand routing protocols because of its lower network overhead and algorithm complexity. AODV protocol does not store all the routing information in its routing table and this causes potential security threat to the wireless networks. In this paper, we consider various known security attacks and in- specific blackhole attack on AODV and propose a countermeasure to thwart blackhole attack.