Thwarting Sybil Attackers in Reputation-based Scheme in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Abstract

Routing in mobile ad hoc networks is performed in a distributed fashion where each node acts as host and router, such that it forwards incoming packets for others without relying on a dedicated router. Nodes are mostly resource constraint and the users are usually inclined to conserve their resources and exhibit selfish behaviour by not contributing in the routing process. The trust and reputation models have been proposed to motivate selfish nodes for cooperation in the packet forwarding process. Nodes having bad trust or reputation are detected and secluded from the network, eventually. However, due to the lack of proper identity management and use of non-persistent identities in ad hoc networks, malicious nodes can pose various threats to these methods. For example, a malicious node can discard the bad reputed identity and enter into the system with another identity afresh, called whitewashing. Similarly, a malicious node may create more than one identity, called Sybil attack, for self-promotion, defame other nodes, and broadcast fake recommendations in the network. These identity-based attacks disrupt the overall detection of the reputation systems. In this paper, we propose a reputation-based scheme that detects selfish nodes and deters identity attacks. We address the issue in such a way that, for normal selfish nodes, it will become no longer advantageous to carry out a whitewash. Sybil attackers are also discouraged (i.e., on a single battery, they may create fewer identities). We design and analyse our rationale via game theory and evaluate our proposed reputation system using NS-2 simulator. The results obtained from the simulation demonstrate that our proposed

Defending against Internal Attacks in Healthcare-Based WSNs

“…Reputation and trust mechanism is a kind of soft security method [ 23 , 24 ]. Soft security usually refers to the use of social or group methods to restrict and control individual behavior, while hard security mainly refers to traditional security methods such as authentication mechanism and authorization mechanism.…”

Survivability Analysis of MANET Routing Protocols under DOS Attacks

“…Reputation and trust-based solutions: in the literature, reputation and trust based schemes, such as [22,23,44], have been proposed for selfish node detection. One of the main concerns regarding using these solutions is the unnecessary incurred overhead, as pointed by [25].…”