Abstract—TCP attacks are the major problem faced by Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) due to its limited network and host resources. Although the session hijack attack is not in the forefront of everyone’s mind, it still remains a commonly used attack in MANET. Session hijack attacks are defined as taking over an active TCP/IP communication session without their permission or knowledge. When implemented successfully, attackers assume the identity of the compromised user, enjoying the same access to resources as the compromised user. Network protocols like FTP, Telnet, and rlogin are especially attractive to the attacker, because of the session oriented nature of their connections, and lack of implementation of any security during logon, authentication, or data transmission. This paper introduces a novel method for defending session hijacking attack in MANET: Sequence number Alteration by Logical Transformation (SALT). Based on the comprehensive evaluation based on experiments, it is showed that SALT can successfully defend session hijacking attack under diverse mobile multi-hop network environment with low communication, computation, and memory overhead.

Index Terms—TCP attacks, mobile Ad hoc networks, session hijacking, sequence number, logical transformation.

The authors are with the Department of ECE, TKMCE, Kollam, Kerala, India (e-mail: nishtkm@gmail.com, drssbtkm@gmail.com).

Cite:N. Nishanth and S. Suresh Babu, "Sequence Number Alteration by Logical Transformation (SALT): A Novel Method for Defending Session Hijacking Attack in Mobile Ad hoc Network," International Journal of Computer and Communication Engineering vol. 3, no. 5, pp. 338-342, 2014.