Defending Against Collaborative Attacks by Malicious Nodes in MANETs: A Cooperative Bait Detection Approach

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), a primary requirement for the establishment of communication among nodes is that nodes should cooperate with each other. In the presence of malevolent nodes, this requirement may lead to serious security concerns; for instance, such nodes may disrupt the routing process. In this context, preventing or detecting malicious nodes launching grayhole or collaborative blackhole attacks is a challenge. This paper attempts to resolve this issue by designing a dynamic source routing (DSR)-based routing mechanism, which is referred to as the cooperative bait detection scheme (CBDS), that integrates the advantages of both proactive and reactive defense architectures. Our CBDS method implements a reverse tracing technique to help in achieving the stated goal. Simulation results are provided, showing that in the presence of malicious-node attacks, the CBDS outperforms the DSR, 2ACK, and best-effort fault-tolerant routing (BFTR) protocols (chosen as benchmarks) in terms of packet delivery ratio and routing overhead (chosen as performance metrics).