Minimizing Routing Attacks in MANET Using Extended Dempster-Shefer Theory

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) have been highly vulnerable to attacks due to the dynamic nature of its network infrastructure. Among these attacks, routing attacks have received considerable attention since it could cause the most devastating damage to MANET. Even though there exist several intrusion response techniques to mitigate such critical attacks, existing solutions typically attempt to isolate malicious nodes based on binary or na ı̈ve fuzzy response decisions. However, binary responses may result in the unexpected network partition, causing additional damages to the network infrastructure, and na ı̈ve fuzzy responses could lead to uncertainty in countering routing attacks in MANET. In this paper, we propose a risk-aware response mechanism to systematically cope with the identified routing attacks. Our risk aware approach is based on an extended DempsterShafer mathematical theory of evidence introducing a notion of importance factors. In addition, our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with the consideration of several performance metrics. Route request flooding attack is one such distributed DoS attack, launched by compromised nodes or intruders. This triggers an acute need of flooding attack prevention mechanisms for this highly vulnerable type of network. In this paper, a reputation based scheme is proposed to resist the impact of flooding attack in MANET. This scheme observes the behavior of a node in the network periodically and limits its route request sending rate accordingly.