Detecting Packet Mishandling in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Mobile Ad-hoc networks are inherently prone to security attacks, with node mobility being the primary cause in allowing security breaches. This makes the network susceptible to Byzantyne faults with packets getting misrouted or dropped. We propose solutions using an unobtrusive monitoring technique to locate malicious packet dropping. This technique uses information from different network layers to detect malicious activity. Any single node can use unobtrusive monitoring without relying on cooperation from other nodes, making this technique easy to implement and deploy. We implemented our technique using ns-2 simulator and conducted extensive experiments using several mobility models. Results show that this technique has high detection effectiveness in detecting malicious behavior with a low false positive rate.