Defense Against Injecting Traffic Attacks in Wireless Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

In ad-hoc networks, nodes need to cooperatively forward packets for each other. Without necessary countermeasures, such networks are extremely vulnerable to injecting traffic attacks, especially those launched by insider attackers. Injecting an overwhelming amount of traffic into the network can easily cause network congestion and decrease the network lifetime. In this paper, we focus on those injecting traffic attacks launched by insider attackers. After investigating the possible types of injecting traffic attacks, we have proposed two sets of defense mechanisms to combat such attacks. The first set of defense mechanisms is fully distributed, while the second is centralized with decentralized implementation. The detection performance of the proposed mechanisms has also been formally analyzed. Both theoretical analysis and experimental studies have demonstrated that under the proposed defense mechanisms, there is almost no gain to launch injecting traffic attacks from the attacker's point of view