A generic trust based routing protocol against internal attacks in manet

Abstract

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) have wide applications in practice, such as rescue, emergency operations, and battlefield communications. MANETs consist of a group of mobile nodes that dynamically exchange data among themselves without the reliance on any fixed infrastructure or centralized administration. Nevertheless, mobility and self-organizing characteristics of MANETs cause the change of topology in an unpredictable way. Due to the limited transmission range, each node has to seek assistance of its neighboring nodes to help relay the data to transmit to other nodes. The reliable neighboring nodes are important for successful data transmission from a source node to a destination node. The early works providing reliable routing mainly rely on cryptographic tools to prevent malicious nodes from injecting false information into network. However, these reliable routing schemes are always coupled with prerequisites, such as authentication center, key management mechanism, which are not feasible in MANETs. Furthermore, cryptographic operations are considered computationally expensive on resource constrained mobile nodes. The most important issue is that these schemes are incapable of tracking internal attackers who are authenticated to participate in the network but misbehaved during the routing process, e.g. black hole and grey-hole attackers. Thus, there is a need to look for a lightweight approach to provide a reliable ad hoc routing. In this thesis, we present two trust-based routing schemes to prevent different routing disruption attacks, such as active black hole, passive black hole, and grey-hole nodes. The most attractive feature is that our proposed schemes are not only capable of