Abstract: Ad-hoc low-power wireless networks are the most promising research direction in sensing and pervasive computing. Prior security work in this area has focused primarily on denial of service at the routing or medium access control levels. Earlier, the resource depletion attacks are considered only as a routing problem, very recently these are classified in to a new group called “vampire attacks”. Vampire attacks are not protocol-specific, in that they do not rely on design properties or implementation faults of particular routing protocols, but rather exploit general properties of protocol classes such as link-state, distance vector, source routing, and geographic and beacon routing .It is clear that all examined protocols are susceptible to Vampire attacks, which are devastating, difficult to detect, and are easy to carry out using as few as one malicious insider sending only protocol compliant messages. In the worst case, a single Vampire can increase network-wide energy usage by a factor of O (N), where N in the number of network nodes. In this paper, we present an approach to detect and prevent the vampire attack in MANET.

Keywords: Vampire attacks, Ad-hoc low-power wireless networks, MANET etc.