Detection and Prevention of MAC Layer Misbehavior for ad hoc Networks

Abstract

It is known that 802.11 is not resilient to selfish behavior and denial of service (DoS) attacks targeting the MAC layer. In this study we assess the performance of the CSMA/CA scheme and investigate its efficiency with regard to security and information assurance in mobile ad hoc wireless networks. We investigate several variants of selfish node behaviors that abuse the random choice of Contention Window in the 802.11 DCF MAC protocol. We show that selfish behavior in the MAC layer can have devastating side effects on the performance of wireless networks similar to the effect of DoS attacks. Our main contributions are the prevention and detection of backoff manipulation in an ad hoc network. First we propose an algorithm to prevent backoff manipulation in a communication link between a sender and a receiver when at least one of the nodes behaves honestly. Secondly, we introduce algorithms for detection of backoff manipulation by a pair of colluding nodes.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2004
Accession Number
ADA439517

Entities

People

  • Alvaro A. Cardenas
  • John Baras
  • Svetlana Radosavac

Organizations

  • University of Maryland

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Ad Hoc Networks
  • Algorithms
  • Computer Networks
  • Denial Of Service Attack
  • Detection
  • Engineering
  • False Alarms
  • Information Operations
  • Mesh Networks
  • Network Protocols
  • Network Topology
  • Networks
  • Probability
  • Probability Distributions
  • Random Variables
  • Transport Protocols
  • Wireless Networks

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking