TEAM: Trust Enhanced Security Architecture for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Abstract

Security is paramount in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) as they are not conducive to centralized trusted authorities. Several solutions have been proposed for MANET in the areas of key management, secure routing, nodal cooperation, and trust management. Nevertheless, MANET lacks a unified architecture to take advantage of the deployed security models. In this paper, we propose trust enhanced security architecture for MANET (TEAM), in which a trust model is overlaid on the following security models - key management mechanism, secure routing protocol, and cooperation model. We briefly present the operation of our architecture and then we detail the system operation of our novel trust and cooperation model, which we call as secure MANET routing with trust intrigue (SMRTI) and fellowship respectively. SMRTI captures the evidence of trustworthiness for other nodes from the security models, and in return assists them to make better security decisions. Unlike related trust models, SMRTI captures recommendations in such a way that it eliminates both free-riding and honest-elicitation problems. In comparison with related cooperation models, fellowship model defends against both flooding and packet drop attacks. It can efficiently identify and isolate both malicious and selfish nodes that fail to share the communication channel or forward packets for other nodes. Furthermore, our models do not rely on any centralized authority or tamper-proof hardware. Simulation results confirm that our models enhance the performance of TEAM.