Perspectives of Sybil attack in routing protocols of mobile ad hoc network

Abstract

It is cumbersome to achieve the security in a mobile ad hoc network due to its open nature, dynamically changing topology, lack of infrastructure and central management. A particular harmful attack that takes the advantage of these characteristics is the Sybil attack, in which a malicious node illegitimately claims multiple identities. Two routing mechanisms vulnerable to the Sybil attack in the mobile ad hoc networks are multi-path routing and geographic routing. In addition to these routing protocols, we show in this paper that the Sybil attack can also disrupt the head selection mechanism of various cluster-based routing protocols such as lowest id, highest node degree and mobility based clustering. To achieve this, we illustrate to have introduced a category of Sybil attack in which the malicious node varies its transmission power to create a number of virtual illegitimate nodes called Sybil Nodes, for the purpose of communication with legitimate nodes of the MANETs. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media.