On the analysis of identity delegation attacks

Identity delegation is a sever attack that can be easily launched against multihop wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. Its severity lies in its capability to evade detection by even the-state-of-the-art intrusion detection techniques such as the neighbor monitoring based mechanisms. Through identity delegation, an adversary can drop packets, evade detection, and frame innocent nodes of dropping the traffic. In a previous work, we proposed a mechanism called Sadec to mitigate identity delegation attacks. In this paper, we provide a thorough investigation of Sadec and compare it with the state-of-the-art mitigation technique dubbed basic local monitoring (BLM). Our analysis which is validated by ns-2 simulation scenarios show that BLM fails to efficiently mitigate packet drop through identity delegation while Sadec successfully mitigates it in addition to considerably reducing the framing incidents of legitimate nodes.