HADOF: defense against routing disruptions in mobile ad hoc networks

HADOF is a set of mechanisms to protect mobile ad hoc networks against routing disruption attacks launched by inside attackers. First, each node launches a route traffic observer to monitor the behavior of each valid route in its route cache, and to collect the packet forwarding statistics submitted by the nodes on this route. Since malicious nodes may submit false reports, each node also keeps cheating records for other nodes. If a node is detected as dishonest, this node will be excluded from future routes, and the other nodes will stop forwarding packets for it. Third, each node will try to build friendship with other nodes to speed up malicious node detection. Route diversity will be explored by each to discover multiple routes to the destination, which can increase the chance of defeating malicious nodes who aim to prevent good routes from being discovered. In addition, adaptive route rediscovery will be applied to determine when new routes should be discovered. HADOF can handle various attacks and introduces little overhead to the existing protocols. Both analysis and simulation studies have confirmed the effectiveness of HADOF.