Risk Aware Mitigation for MANET Routing Attacks

Abstract:

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) have been highly vulnerable to attacks 

due to the dynamic nature of its network infrastructure. Among these attacks, 

routing attacks have received considerable attention since it could cause the 

most devastating damage to MANET. Even though there exist several intrusion 

response techniques to mitigate such critical attacks, existing solutions 

typically attempt to isolate malicious nodes based on binary or naive fuzzy 

response decisions.

 However, binary responses may result in the unexpected network partition, 

causing additional damages to the network infrastructure, and naive fuzzy 

responses could lead to uncertainty in countering routing attacks in MANET. In 

this paper, we propose a risk-aware response mechanism to systematically 

cope with the identified routing attacks. Our risk-aware approach is based on 

an extended Dempster-Shafer mathematical theory of evidence introducing a 

notion of importance factors. In addition, our experiments demonstrate the 

effectiveness of our approach with the consideration of several performance 

metrics.

Fig.  Risk-aware response mechanism