Detection and mitigation of attacks by colluding misbehaving nodes in MANET

Abstract

A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is an infrastructure-less network, operated and managed by the nodes themselves. Inherently secure routing protocols are must for operational continuity of such networks which requires sustained and benevolent behavior by all participating nodes. A number of secure routing protocols based on trust have recently been proposed, which are able to detect routing misbehavior in the direct neighborhood of a node. However, collusion of misbehaving nodes has not been adequately addressed yet. In this paper, we present and evaluate a protocol, in which multipath routing combined with trust information of the nodes involved, are used to detect misbehaviors on data delivery formed by one or more misbehaving nodes in an ad hoc network. Data and control packets are transmitted through node-disjoint trust-worthy paths. Our protocol is able to withstand against attacks carried out by multiple malicious nodes acting in collusion. We take advantage of the existence of multiple paths between nodes in an ad hoc network to increase the confidentiality and robustness of transmitted data. We have evaluated the misbehaving node detection rate and the performance of our method along a number of parameters through simulation. Results show that our method increases the throughput of the network while also discovering a secure route. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.