Lightweight Detection of Malicious Nodes in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are self arranging, dynamic, infrastructure-less and multi-hop networks formed by a group(s) of mobile nodes (MNs), which transmit information via wireless channels. The broadcast nature of the wireless medium makes MANETs vulnerable to various types of attacks (e.g., masquerading attack, node replication attack, Sybil attack and so on). A critical challenge that allows replicas to defeat the well-known detection algorithms is known as abnormal or selected silence. This problem arises when replicas intentionally become silent at specific time periods or stop broadcasting detection packets. As a result, the attackers become invisible and successfully evade the detection process. Most of the existing detection techniques are vulnerable to these malicious activities. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight technique for mitigating the above issue in MANETs. Our solution is lightweight and does not need the use of extra communication or geographical positioning system (GPS). Simulation results show excellent detection accuracy of the proposed scheme.