A Combined Biologically and Socially Inspired Approach to Mitigating Ad Hoc Network Threats

This paper describes a collaborative approach to handling dynamic attack threats in mobile ad hoc networks. Our approach is biologically and socially motivated. Each network node maintains a trust score for each other node of which it is aware and distributes these to its neighbourhood. Services have associated trust thresholds - the more sensitive the service, the higher the threshold. We define a robust decentralised dynamic system involving nodes, services and trust scores that helps to quickly and reliably locate potential sources of attacks and their threat level. The paper presents results of simulations of the behaviour of the system's dynamics and its interpretation in the context of ad hoc networks.