Novel detection mechanisms for malicious attacks targeting the cluster-based OLSR protocol

In this paper, we identify and propose novel mechanisms to detect possible attacks against the cluster-based OLSR, known as SC-OLSR. Such an energy-efficient routing protocol has been proposed to prolong the network lifetime and motivate selfish nodes to cooperate during the selection of Cluster Heads (CHs) and MultiPoint Relay nodes (MPR). Unfortunately, this protocol is still vulnerable to the presence of malicious nodes. To detect malicious activities, taking into consideration network lifetime, we randomly select a set of nodes that will play the role of intrusion detection monitors. The selected nodes will monitor the behavior of regular nodes, MPRs, and CHs looking for abnormal activities such as the disruption of cluster head election. Our simulation results show that with 50% of monitors we can detect malicious activities with probability more than 70%. According to severity of attacks, intrusion detection nodes can be gradually added and thus our solution is able to consider the tradeoff between security and network lifetime.