Simulation, Analysis and Design of Trust Based security in MANETs

Abstract

Ad hoc networks are a new wireless networking paradigm for mobile hosts. In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), every node has to act as a router for the network to function. Unlike traditional mobile wireless networks, ad hoc networks do not rely on any fixed infrastructure. Thus, the security threats from malicious attackers take a different shape due to the basic difference in their functionality from their wired counterparts. Current ad hoc routing protocols assume the networks to be benevolent and cannot cope with misbehavior of nodes. The misbehavior may be due to node being malicious or selfish to save the battery power. Thus, this work is of significant importance because now-a-days, new cryptographic schemes, such as threshold cryptography, are used to build a highly secure key management service that forms the core of security framework presented in this work. The CONFIDANT (Cooperation Of Nodes: Fairness In Dynamic Ad-hoc Network) on DSR (Dynamic Source Routing Protocol) is simulated in order to evaluate how the network performance changes as dynamic feedback mechanisms are introduced in an ad hoc network to control the node misbehavior. The above results have been used to design a trust based routing protocol that uses reputation data to provide dynamic feedback.