Secure Routing Techniques to Mitigate Insider Attacks in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Route falsification attacks are easy to launch in wireless ad hoc networks with on demand routing protocols that employ network-wide flooding of control packets for route discoveries. Colluding insider malicious nodes with no special hardware capability can use packet encapsulation and tunnelling to create bogus short-cuts in routing paths and influence data traffic to flow through them. The current secure on demand routing protocols for ad hoc networks are susceptible to these attacks. This paper presented several design guidelines to mitigate the impact of such attacks and a secure on-demand routing (SOR) protocol that incorporates these techniques. SOR is based on pairwise symmetric keys among all nodes in the network. It is flexible and can be tweaked to accommodate desired security and performance criteria. We implemented SOR and a previously proposed secure routing protocol called Ariadne in the Glomosim simulator and evaluated their performances with and without route falsification attacks by colluding insider nodes. Our analysis indicates that SOR is resistent to these attacks and performs well with low overhead in normal networks.