Colluding injected attack in mobile ad-hoc networks

The growth of laptops, personal digital assistant (PDA) and 802.11/Wi-Fi wireless networking have made mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) and machine-to-machine (M2M) popular research topics recently. With more attention on M2M and MANETs lately, the security issues become more important and urgent for managing and deploying in such networks. The flexible deployment nature and the lack of fixed infrastructure make MANETs suffer from varieties of security attacks. In this paper, we show how an adversary can utilize a colluding attack in MANET by injecting malicious nodes in the network, while hiding their identities from other legitimate nodes. We will name this attack as the Colluding Injected Attack (CIA). These injected nodes will work together to generate a severe attack in the network, which aims to create a collision at an arbitrary node, which in turn will result in making the attacked node unable to receive or relay any packet. As a result this node could be wrongly reported as having a malicious behavior by any other node in the same neighborhood, or it might be reported as unreachable if it is a destination node. Our simulation results show that the existence of an adversary that launching the colluding injected attack (CIA) will mislead the decision of previous attack detection schemes.