Is Mobile Ad hoc Network Honeypot for Attackers?

A s we know that the best utilization of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are rescue mission, disaster relief, mine site operation, electronic class room, emergency operation and battle field. The security of communications in MANETs is important particularly in case of military applications. The absence of any central coordination system and shared wireless channel makes this category of wireless network more vulnerable to digital or cyber attacks than wired networks. The MANETs experience two major types of attacks i.e. active attacks and passive attack.
1. Passive Attacks:

Passive attack doesn't influence the functionality of a communication or connection, only perform the eavesdropping. Some time the recognition of this attack is very tedious. Spoofing is one of passive attack. Normally encryption techniques are used to mitigate passive attacks. There are two types of passive attack i.e. Traffic Analysis, Passive Eavesdropping.
2. Active Attacks:

The main intension of this attack is to penetrate into the system and disrupt the network resources. This attack may categorize into two categories that are internal and external attacks.
External Attack

In this type of attack the attacker attacks outside the network and not belonging within the network. Majority of time it is observed that the external attacks can easily be recognized.
Internal Attack

In Internal attack, the attacker belongs within the network and attacks the resources inside the network. Since the victim and attacker both are belonging to the same network, so some time it is more severe and difficult to find out the attacker.

Now we are going to discuss different layers attacks, these all attacks are belonging to Active Attack category.
2.1 Black-Hole Attack (Network Layer Attack)

All packets are dropped by sending forged routing packets, the attacker could route all packets for some destination to itself and then discard them, or the attacker could cause the route at all nodes in an area of the network to point into that area when in fact the destination is outside the area.
2.2 Wormhole Attack (Network Layer Attack)

Using a pair of Attacker nodes X and Y linked via a private network connection. Every packet that X receives from ad hoc network, X forwards through the wormhole to Y, to then be rebroadcast by Y, similarly, Y may send all ad hoc network packets to X.
2.3 Malign Attack (Network Layer Attack)

Watchdog and path rather-are used in ad hoc routing protocols to keep track of perceived malicious nodes in a blacklist. An attacker may blackmail a good node, causing other good nodes to add that node to their blacklist, thus avoiding that node in routes.
2.4 Partition Attack (Network Layer Attack)

An attacker may try to partition the network by injecting forged routing packets to prevent one set of nodes from reaching another.
2.5 Ad hoc Flooding Attack (Network Layer Attack)

Ad hoc flooding attack may categorize into two sub-types. One is RREQ Flooding attack and second is Data Flooding attack. In RREQ Flooding attack, an attacker node sends many route requests packets to the fake or void address just to occupy the network resources. In Data Flooding attack, a node first constructs the path and then transmits useless data in huge quantity just to occupy the network resources. These attacks some time also called Denial of Service (DoS) Attack.
2.6 Detour Attack (Network Layer Attack)

An attacker may attempt to cause a node to use detours through suboptimal routes. Also compromised nodes may try to work together to create a routing loop.
2.7 Routing Table Poisoning Attack (Network Layer Attack)

The publication and advertisement of fictitious routes.
2.8 Packet Replication Attack (Network Layer Attack)

The replication of sale packets, to consume additional resources such as bandwidth.
2.9 Session Hijacking Attack (Transport Layer Attack)

One weak point is that the most authentications processes are only carried out once when a session starts. An adversary could try to appear as an authentic node and hijack the session.
2.10 Repudiation Attack (Application Layer Attack)

A repudiation attack happens when an application or system does not adopt controls to properly track and log users' actions, thus permitting malicious manipulation or forging the identification of new actions. This attack can be used to change the authoring information of actions executed by a malicious user in order to log wrong data to log files.
2.11 Jamming Attack (MAC Layer Attack)

An adversary sends signals with the same frequency in that a sender and receiver communicate what cause a lot of errors in the transmission.
3. Layers and Security Issues

Security issues in Application Layer are detecting and preventing viruses such as wormholes, malicious codes and applications abuses.
Security issues in Transport Layer are authentication and securing end-to-end communication through data encryption
Security issues in Network Layer are protecting the ad hoc routing and forwarding protocols.
Security issues in Link Layer are protecting the wireless MAC protocol and providing link layer security support
Security issues in Physical Layer are preventing signal jamming , denial of service attacks