Malicious Insider Threats in Tactical MANET: The Performace Analysis of DSR Routing Protocol

摘要

Tactical Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (T-MANETs) are mainly used in self-configuring automatic vehicles and robots for the rescue and military operations. A high dynamic network architecture, node unreliability, node misbehavior as well as an open wireless medium make difficult to assume the nodes cooperation in the 'ad-hoc' network or comply with the routing rule. The routing protocols in the T-MANET are unprotected and subsequently result in various kind of misbehaviors (such as selfishness and denial of service) of T-MANET wireless nodes. This paper introduces a comprehensive analysis of the packet dropping attack which includes three types of misbehaviors, such as black hole, gray hole, and selfish behaviours, conducted by insider nodes in the T-MANETs. An insider threat model is appended to a state-of-the-art routing protocol (such as DSR) and analyze the effect of packet dropping attack on the performance evaluation of DSR in the T-MANET. This paper contributes to the existing knowledge in a way that it allows further security research to understand the behaviours of the main threats in MANETs which depends on node's defection in the packet forwarding. The simulation of the packet dropping attack is conducted using the Network Simulator 2 (NS2). It has been found that the network throughput has dropped considerably for black and gray hole attacks whereas the selfish nodes delay the network flow. Moreover, the packet drop rate and energy consumption rate are higher for black and gray hole attacks.