Abstract
To secure a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) in adversarial environments, a particularly challenging problem is how to feasibly detect and defend possible attacks on routing protocols, particularly internal attacks, such as a Byzantine attack. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that detects internal attacks by using both message and route redundancy during route discovery. The route-discovery messages are protected by pairwise secret keys between a source and destination and some intermediate nodes along a route established by using public key cryptographic mechanisms. We also propose an optimal routing algorithm with routing metric combining both requirements on a node's trustworthiness and performance. A node builds up the trustworthiness on its neighboring nodes based on its observations on the behaviors of the neighbor nodes. Both of the proposed algorithms can be integrated into existing routing protocols for MANETs, such as ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) and dynamic source routing (DSR). As an example, we present such an integrated protocol called secure routing against collusion (SRAC), in which a node makes a routing decision based on its trust of its neighboring nodes and the performance provided by them. The simulation results have demonstrated the significant advantages of the proposed attack detection and routing algorithm over some known protocols.