A new secure routing protocol to defend Byzantine attacks for ad hoc networks

To secure ad hoc networks, a particularly challenging problem is how to feasibly detect and defend the internal attacks against the routing protocols, such as Byzantine behaviors. In this paper, we develop: (1) an efficient distributed key management scheme that a source node can authenticate its neighbors and establish a session key on-demand; (2) a novel detection algorithm that can detect the internal attacks, such as Byzantine attacks, by using both message and route redundancy; (3) a new secure routing protocol (SRP), behavior-based secure routing (BBSR), in which a node selects its best route based on its accumulated trust on the nodes along the candidate routes; (4) a cost function that directly measures the cost of the increased trustworthiness and its impact on network performance. The simulation results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed key management scheme, attack detection algorithm, and routing protocol.