Crosscheck mechanism to identify malicious nodes in ad hoc networks

Abstract

AbstractRoute falsification attacks are easy to launch in mobile ad hoc networks with on demand routing protocols that employ network‐wide flooding of control packets for route discoveries. To mitigate such attacks, we propose a p‐hop crosscheck mechanism, which requires nodes p, p ≥ 2, hops apart to authenticate and verify route reply packets using pairwise shared keys. This mechanism can detect route falsification by non‐colluding malicious nodes on‐the‐fly; furthermore, it can identify a group of at most p+1 nodes that contain the malicious nodes that caused the route falsification. Unlike intrusion detection techniques, which require extensive monitoring and sampling, the proposed crosscheck mechanism is light‐weight and fast and hence can be used to augment the existing secure routing protocols and improve intrusion detection capability. We implement a two‐hop crosscheck for an on demand ad hoc network routing protocol. Using simulations, we show that the two‐hop crosscheck mitigates attacks by multiple malicious nodes with negligible impact on performance. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.