Resilient PUMA (Protocol for Unified Multicasting through Announcement) against internal attacks in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

In Mobile Ad hoc Networks, entire communication solely depends on multi-hop routing in order to cover the larger area through wireless medium. When MANET is applicable for civilian purpose, the cooperation among nodes creates more security issues. Neighbor dependency without any centralized authority is the major vulnerability to different types of internal attacks. Internal attacks can be triggered either by selfish nodes or malicious nodes. Multicast communication makes this security issue more severe where non group members are also the part of multicast routing structure in this communication. In this paper, we analyzed a mesh-based multicast routing protocol PUMA against various types of protocol-dependent internal attacks. Also we have proposed a solution for two particular internal attacks; watchdog-based data packet dropper attacker identification and validating parent´s information from core using newly added control packet MA-to-Core for MA packet modification attacks. NS2 simulation results are used to observe the response of protocol performance metrics such as PDR and control overhead against internal attacks. Particularly this research work focuses on security vulnerabilities of PUMA routing protocol and evaluate our proposed solutions for internal attacks using simulation results.