Defense against Routing Disruption Attacks in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

We propose a secure routing architecture for Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) called ThroughpUt-Feedback (TUF) routing, which is resilient against a wide range of routing disruption Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. Unlike many existing solutions, TUF does not focus on a particular type of attack, but instead takes an approach that is fundamentally more general. TUF is a cross-layer technique that detects attacks at the transport layer but responds to attacks at the network layer. Because most routing disruption attacks cause a significant drop in end-to-end goodput, monitoring the goodput of a route at the transport layer can detect abnormalities in the network (e.g., node or link failures, DoS attacks, etc.). Once an abnormal event is detected, a route rebuilding process is initiated at the network layer to find a new route. Using analysis and simulation results, we show that the TUF architecture is effective in thwarting a wide range of attacks, including protocol-compliant (also known as “JellyFish”) attacks.