A Sequence Number Prediction Based Bait Detection Scheme to Mitigate Sequence Number Attacks in MANETs

The characteristics of MANET such as decentralized architecture, dynamic topologies make MANETs susceptible to various security attacks. Sequence number attacks are such type of security threats which tend to degrade the network functioning and performance by sending fabricated route reply packets (RREP) with the objective of getting involved in the route and drop some or all of the data packets during the data transmission phase. The sequence number adversary attempts to send a fabricated high destination number in the RREP packet which attracts the sender to establish a path through the adversary node. This paper proposes a proactive secure routing mechanism which is an improvement over the authors previously proposed scheme. It makes use of linear regression mechanism to predict the maximum destination sequence number that the neighboring node can insert in the RREP packet. As an additional security checkpoint, it uses a bait detection mechanism to establish confidence in marking a suspicious node as a malicious node. The proposed approach works in collaboration with the ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) protocol. The simulation results depict that the approach improves the network performance in the presence of adversaries as compared to previously proposed scheme.