A novel block chain based cluster head authentication protocol for machine-type communication in LTE network: Statistical analysis on attack detection

"Machine-to-machine (M2M) is a kind of application and service based on intelligent interaction and networking among machine terminals, which is also called machine-type communications (MTC)". Here, this paper intends to develop an enhanced secure MTC in LTE Network that takes place under two phases namely, (i) coarse grained attack detection system and (ii) fine grained attack detection system. Initially, the clustering of nodes takes place using LEACH approach and followed by that cluster head (CH) selection takes place by considering the constraints like distance, penalty, energy, and delay. The penalty determined may ensure the secured CH selection results from optimized Neural Network (NN) model. If penalty is assigned as one, particular node is forbidden, which cannot be selected as head node (simply dropped from network). Nodes information is transmitted in Blocks of block chain to authenticate the nodes with the support of Cluster Head (CH) and to ensure the integrity of the block chain. Further, fine grained attack detection system is carried out that authenticate the selected CH to assure attack free network. As a major contribution, the training of NN is carried out by means of a novel algorithm named as Whale with Tri-level Update (WTU). Finally, the superiority of the adopted scheme is analyzed over existing schemes in terms of correlation. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University.