A Timing Attack Control Mechanism for Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) Using IIR-based Filtering with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) Algorithm

Abstract

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are decentralized, infrastructure-less systems often deployed in mission-critical scenarios such as military operations, emergency response, and IoT-based sensor environments. Despite their flexibility, MANETs are prone to timing-based side-channel attacks due to constrained computational resources and unsecured communication. While the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) remains the industry standard for symmetric encryption, it is vulnerable to timing attacks that exploit execution time differences to infer secret keys. This paper presents a lightweight and scalable Timing Attack Control Mechanism (TACM) that integrates a first-order Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filter into the AES execution flow to eliminate timing leakages. Unlike conventional countermeasures, TACM introduces minimal computational overhead and requires no changes to the AES algorithm. Implemented in Python and MATLAB, the system achieves over 70% reduction in timing variance with only ~1.6% performance cost. This technique is ideal for real-time security in constrained environments such as MANETs, embedded devices, and IoT systems.