Analysis of DoS Attacks at MAC Layer in Mobile Adhoc Networks

—Wireless network security has received tremendous attention due to the vulnerabilities exposed in the open communication medium. The most common wireless Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is IEEE 802.11, which assumes all the nodes in the network are cooperative. However, nodes may purposefully misbehave in order to disrupt network performance, obtain extra bandwidth and conserve resources. These MAC layer misbehaviours can lead to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks which can disrupt the network operation. There is a lack of comprehensive analysis of MAC layer misbehaviour driven DoS attacks for the IEEE 802.11 protocol. This research studied possible MAC layer DoS attack strategies that are driven by the MAC layer malicious/selfish nodes and investigates the performance of the IEEE 802.11 protocol. Such DoS attacks caused by malicious and selfish nodes violating backoff timers associated with the protocol. The experimental and analytical approach evaluates several practical MAC layer backoff value manipulation and the impact of such attacks on the network performance and stability in MANETs. The simulation results show that introducing DoS attacks at MAC layer could significantly affect the network throughput and data packet collision rate. This paper concludes that DoS attacks with selfish/malicious intend can obtain a larger throughput by denying well-behaved nodes to obtain deserved throughput, also DoS attacks with the intend of complete destruction of the network can succee

Resilient Misbehaviour Detection MAC Protocol (MD-MAC) for Distributed Wireless Networks

Chaminda Alocious, Hannan Xiao, B. Christianson, 'Resilient Misbehaviour Detection MAC Protocol (MD-MAC) for Distributed Wireless Networks' paper presented at the 2016 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (IEEE WCNC). Doha, Qatar. 3-6 April 2016Wireless network security requirements are becoming more important and critical. The modern network security architectures require more attention to provide security in each network layer. This will require understanding of protocol vulnerabilities in existing protocol architectures. However, providing security requirements are not just limited to confidentiality and integrity, also availability and fairness are important security elements. IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is one of the most common standard in modern day networks and has been designed without a consideration for providing security protection at MAC layer. IEEE 802.11 assumes all the nodes in the network are cooperative. However, nodes may purposefully misbehave in order to obtain extra bandwidth, conserve resources and disrupt network performance. This research proposes a Misbehaviour Detection MAC protocol (MD-MAC) to address the problematic scenarios of MAC layer misbehaviours, which takes a novel approach to detect misbehaviours in Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs). The MD-MAC modifies the CSMA/CA protocol message exchange and uses verifiable backoff value generation mechanism with an incorporated trust model which is suitable for distributed networks. The MD-MAC protocol has been implemented and evaluated in ns2, simulation results suggest that the protocol is able to detect misbehaving wireless nodes in a distributed network environment

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

Collaboration Enforcement In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) have attracted great research interest in recent years. Among many issues, lack of motivation for participating nodes to collaborate forms a major obstacle to the adoption of MANETs. Many contemporary collaboration enforcement techniques employ reputation mechanisms for nodes to avoid and penalize malicious participants. Reputation information is propagated among participants and updated based on complicated trust relationships to thwart false accusation of benign nodes. The aforementioned strategy suffers from low scalability and is likely to be exploited by adversaries. To address these problems, we first propose a finite state model. With this technique, no reputation information is propagated in the network and malicious nodes cannot cause false penalty to benign hosts. Misbehaving node detection is performed on-demand; and malicious node punishment and avoidance are accomplished by only maintaining reputation information within neighboring nodes. This scheme, however, requires that each node equip with a tamper-proof hardware. In the second technique, no such restriction applies. Participating nodes classify their one-hop neighbors through direct observation and misbehaving nodes are penalized within their localities. Data packets are dynamically rerouted to circumvent selfish nodes. In both schemes, overall network performance is greatly enhanced. Our approach significantly simplifies the collaboration enforcement process, incurs low overhead, and is robust against various malicious behaviors. Simulation results based on different system configurations indicate that the proposed technique can significantly improve network performance with very low communication cost

Proposing an Effective Retransmission Using the Relaying Nodes for Multihop Networks

Coop MAC has been recently proposed as a possible implementation of cooperation protocols in the medium access control (MAC) layer of a wireless network. However, some nodes may refrain from cooperation for selfish purposes, e.g. in order to save energy, in what is called selfish behavior or misbehavior. This protocol violation worsens other nodes’ performance and can be avoided if other nodes detect and punish (e.g. banning from the network) misbehaving nodes. However, fading and interference may prevent nodes from cooperating even if they are willing, therefore it is not trivial to identify misbehaving nodes. In a fading scenario where an automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol is used, we propose a mechanism that allows detecting misbehaving nodes. Two approaches, either based on the uniformly most powerful (UMP) test or on the sequential probability ratio test (SPRT) are considered. The two techniques are characterized and compared in terms of their average detection delay and resulting network performance. Index Terms: Ad-hoc networks, cooperative diversity, medium access control, MIMO systems, security, privacy, and authentication

Secure Routing and Medium Access Protocols inWireless Multi-hop Networks

While the rapid proliferation of mobile devices along with the tremendous growth of various applications using wireless multi-hop networks have significantly facilitate our human life, securing and ensuring high quality services of these networks are still a primary concern. In particular, anomalous protocol operation in wireless multi-hop networks has recently received considerable attention in the research community. These relevant security issues are fundamentally different from those of wireline networks due to the special characteristics of wireless multi-hop networks, such as the limited energy resources and the lack of centralized control. These issues are extremely hard to cope with due to the absence of trust relationships between the nodes. To enhance security in wireless multi-hop networks, this dissertation addresses both MAC and routing layers misbehaviors issues, with main focuses on thwarting black hole attack in proactive routing protocols like OLSR, and greedy behavior in IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. Our contributions are briefly summarized as follows. As for black hole attack, we analyze two types of attack scenarios: one is launched at routing layer, and the other is cross layer. We then provide comprehensive analysis on the consequences of this attack and propose effective countermeasures. As for MAC layer misbehavior, we particularly study the adaptive greedy behavior in the context of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) and propose FLSAC (Fuzzy Logic based scheme to Struggle against Adaptive Cheaters) to cope with it. A new characterization of the greedy behavior in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) is also introduced. Finally, we design a new backoff scheme to quickly detect the greedy nodes that do not comply with IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, together with a reaction scheme that encourages the greedy nodes to become honest rather than punishing them