Detection Method Against Fake Message Attacks in Sparse Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

In this paper, we consider a detection method against fake messages in sparse mobile ad-hoc networks, where nodes are temporally isolated. In these networks, messages are delivered to their destination nodes using store-carry-forward routing, where they are relayed by some nodes. Therefore, when a node has messages in its buffer, it can easily rewrite them. When there exist malicious nodes in the network, they can alter messages to fake message and launch fake message attacks, spreading the fake messages over the network. In this paper, we first model system dynamics as a continuous-time absorbing Markov chain, and clarify how fake message attacks affect the system performance using Markov analysis. We then propose a detection method that uses the hash value of messages. Whenever a node that has a message and its hash value encounters another node, it forwards only one of them to that node. By doing so, the message and its hash value are delivered to the destination node via different paths. Through simulation experiments, we show the effectiveness of our proposed method.