Misbehavior detection and isolation in peer-to-peer networks with the presence of hidden nodes

All smartphones and tablets are currently equipped with Network Interface Cards (NIC) that use IEEE 802.11 family to access Wi-Fi networks or communicate in a peer-to-peer model, which is the topic of this paper. This paper presents a novel technique to detect and isolate a rogue user that modified the firmware on the device´s NIC card to capture the channel either to disrupt the communication or to illegally increase its own node throughput in a wireless network with hidden nodes present at the expense of other nodes in the network. The attacker modifies the NIC (Network Card Interface) firmware that is using IEEE 802.11 DCF to deviate from the normal back-off mechanism specified by the IEEE standard which significantly increases the successful probabilities of its packet transmissions. The attacker node only backs off one slot every time it has a packet to transmit or when it experiences a collision. As a result, the attacker captures the channel (Bandwidth) and prevents others from sharing the bandwidth. The attacker forces the NIC to have a firmware upgrade that contains the malicious code. The proposed algorithm detects the attacker in a network with the presence of hidden nodes. The paper´s main contributions are: a new method to model Markov Chain to account for the hidden nodes´ throughputs, a detection algorithm, and an isolation technique to isolate the attacker.