Advances on Security in Ad Hoc Networks: A preliminary analysis

Today we live in a hyper-connected world, where a large amount of applications and services are supported by ad hoc networks. They have a decentralized management, are flexible and versatile but their characteristics are in turn their main weaknesses. This work introduces a preliminary analysis of the evolution, trends and the state of the art in the context of the security in ad hoc networks. To this end, two different methodologies are applied: a bibliometric analysis and a Systematic Literature Review. Results show that security in MANETs and VANETs are still an appealing research field. In addition, we realized that there is no clear separation of solutions by line of defense. This is because they are sometimes misclassified by the authors or simply there is no line of defense that totally fit well with the proposed solution. Because of that, new taxonomies including novel definitions of lines of defense are needed. In this work, we propose the use of tolerant or survivable solutions which are the ones that preserve critical system or network services in presence of fault, malfunctions or attacks.