A Candour-based Trust and Reputation Management System for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The decentralized administrative controlled-nature of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) presents security vulnerabilities which can lead to attacks such as malicious modification of packets. To enhance security in MANETs, Trust and Reputation Management systems (TRM) have been developed to serve as measures in mitigating threats arising from unusual behaviours of nodes. In this paper we propose a candour-based trust and reputation system which measures and models reputation and trust propagation in MANETs. In the proposed model Dirichlet Probability Distribution is employed in modelling the individual reputation of nodes and the trust of each node is computed based on the node’s actual network performance and the quality of the recommendations it gives about other nodes. Cooperative nodes in our model will be rewarded for expanding their energy in forwarding packets for other nodes or for disseminating genuine recommenda-tions. Uncooperative nodes are isolated and denied the available network resources. We employed the Ruffle algorithm which will ensure that cooperative nodes are allowed to activate sleep mode when their service is not required in forwarding packets for its neighbouring trustworthy nodes. The proposed TRM system enshrines fairness in its mode of operation as well as creating an enabling environment free from bias. It will also ensure a connected and capacity preserving network of trustworthy node

Data Confidentiality in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are self-configuring infrastructure-less networks comprised of mobile nodes that communicate over wireless links without any central control on a peer-to-peer basis. These individual nodes act as routers to forward both their own data and also their neighbours' data by sending and receiving packets to and from other nodes in the network. The relatively easy configuration and the quick deployment make ad hoc networks suitable the emergency situations (such as human or natural disasters) and for military units in enemy territory. Securing data dissemination between these nodes in such networks, however, is a very challenging task. Exposing such information to anyone else other than the intended nodes could cause a privacy and confidentiality breach, particularly in military scenarios. In this paper we present a novel framework to enhance the privacy and data confidentiality in mobile ad hoc networks by attaching the originator policies to the messages as they are sent between nodes. We evaluate our framework using the Network Simulator (NS-2) to check whether the privacy and confidentiality of the originator are met. For this we implemented the Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs), as NS-2 agents that manage and enforce the policies attached to packets at every node in the MANET.Comment: 12 page

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

Using trust to detect denial of service attacks in the internet of things over MANETs

The rapid growth of employing devices as tools in daily life and the technological revolution have led to the invention of a novel paradigm; the Internet of Things (IoT). It includes a group of ubiquitous devices that communicate and share data with each other. These devices use the Internet Protocol (IP) to manage network nodes through mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). IoT is beneficial to MANET as the nodes are self-organising and the information reach can be expanded according to the network range. Due to the nature of MANET, such as dynamic topology, a number of challenges are inherent, such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. DoS attacks prohibit legitimate users from accessing their authorised services. In addition, because of the high mobility of MANET, the network can merge with other networks. In this situation, two or more networks of untrusted nodes may join one another leaving each of the networks open to attack. This paper proposes a novel method to detect DoS attacks immediately prior to the merger of two MANETs. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach, a Grayhole attack is used in this study to evaluate the performance of the proposed method in detecting attacks

Literature Survey of Security Enhancement in MANET Routing Protocols of WLANs

A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is an autonomous collection of mobile users that communicate over relatively bandwidth constrained wireless links. One of the main issues in such networks is performance- in a dynamically changing topology; the nodes are expected to be power-aware due to the bandwidth constrained network. Another issue in such networks is security - since every node participates in the operation of the network equally, Malicious nodes are difficult to detect. There are several applications of mobile ad hoc networks such as disaster recovery operations, battle field communications, etc. The most active research area under MANET routing protocol is security. MANETs have certain unique characteristics that make them vulnerable to several types of attacks. Since they are deployed an open environment where all nodes co-operate in forwarding the packets in the network, Malicious nodes are difficult to detect

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