Mobi-Herald: Alert Propagation in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Intrusion/misbehavior detection and response are two important components for defending against various attacks in mobile ad hoc networks. Unfortunately, there is a gap between local intrusion/misbehavior detection and network-wide response in such networks. To bridge this gap, alert propagation, aiming to spread alert messages to the whole network upon detection of malicious/abnormal activity, is a viable solution but has been overlooked. Epidemic routing schemes are available to propagate messages to the entire network. However, alert propagation cannot simply rely on epidemic routing schemes only, because these schemes can be utilized by malicious nodes (slanderers) to defame other network nodes to issue DoS attacks. In this paper, we present a novel protocol for alert propagation, called MobiHerald. To achieve high coverage of message delivery, we design a novel mobility-assisted epidemic routing scheme to propagate alert messages efficiently. To defend against slander attack, our Mobi-Herald alert propagation scheme adopts threshold-based verification against collusive slanderers. To ensure transmission efficiency, we use control parameter times-to-send (TTS) to limit unnecessary transmissions. We evaluate the Mobi-Herald alert propagation protocol through both theoretical analysis and simulation. We conclude that Mobi-Herald achieves excellent coverage of message delivery with small message overhead and reasonable alert propagation delay.