Implications of misbehaving attacks on probabilistic quorum system for MANETs

Reliable storage supports different data sharing services, such as mobility and cryptographic key management and distributed naming. Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) present issues in guaranteeing the consistency of data on concurrent read and write due to dynamism of nodes, the inexistence of a central control entity and support infrastructure. Probabilistic quorum systems, as PAN (Probabilistic Ad Hoc Quorum System), were designed for MANETs to improve the efficiency of data replication by relaxing consistency constraints, comprising a set of quorums with relaxed intersections among themselves. PAN ensures high probability of consistency between replicated data by an asymmetric quorum construction and by a gossip-based multicast protocol. However, it does not consider the presence of malicious or selfish nodes in its operations. This work assesses the impact of lack of cooperation, timeout and data manipulation attacks against PAN. Simulation results show that PAN is vulnerable to these attacks, particularly, the data manipulation attack.