A new defense scheme against DDoS attack in mobile Ad Hoc networks

Abstract

The mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are highly vulnerable to attacks because of its unique characteristics such as open network architecture, shared wireless medium, stringent resource constraints and highly dynamic network topology. In particular, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks can severely cripple network performance with relatively little effort expended by the attacker. These attacks throttle the tcp throughput heavily. A new defense scheme is proposed to develop a flow monitoring scheme to defend against such attacks in mobile adhoc networks. Our proposed defense mechanism uses the medium access control (MAC) layer information to detect the attackers. The defense mechanism includes bandwidth reservation and distributed rate control. Once the attackers are identified, all the packets from those nodes will be blocked. The network resources are made available to the legitimate users. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.