| Abstract | Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) become
increasingly essential for applications requiring flexible,
infrastructure-free communication, like military missions,
disaster relief, and IoT installations. They are vulnerable to a
wide variety of security threats, including routing attacks, node
impersonation, and eavesdropping, due to their dynamic
topology, decentralized nature, and limited resources. Current
security paradigms tend to find it difficult to cope with the
dynamic and unpredictable nature of MANETs, presenting a
large research gap in designing viable proactive defense
approaches suitable for such networks. This research focuses
on filling the above gap through designing a new security
framework that incorporates mimic defense and moving target
defense (MTD) approaches to make MANETs more resilient.
Precisely, the goal is to provide dynamic changes—such as
routing heterogeneity, node identification randomization, and
resource distribution diversification—that repeatedly reshape
the attack surface of the network, making it more complex for
any possible adversaries and less impactful from attacks.
Toward this aim, we introduced attack modeling and attack
chain analysis specifically for MANET settings in order to
simulate various types of attacks and measure the proposed
framework’s robustness. Dynamic security measures were
deployed in a simulation setting, and performance indicators
like attack success rate, network throughput, and latency were
quantified. The outcomes indicated that the proposed methods
significantly lowered the success rate of typical attacks, such as
black hole and Sybil attacks, while keeping network
performance at acceptable levels. In addition, the simulations
indicated enhancements in overall network resilience and
responsiveness in adversarial settings. These results suggest
that the use of mimicry and MTD strategies in MANETs
represents a promising direction for the design of proactive,
adaptive security systems. This work adds to the general task
of securing infrastructure-less networks and is of significant
import to their deployment in critical sectors where secure,
fault-tolerant communication is critical.
|
|---|
