A novel voting mechanism for compromised node revocation in wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

Due to the nature of wireless ad hoc networks such as dynamic infrastructure and non-centralized management, the routing process has a huge exposure to malicious hacking and intrusions. This fact results in a likelihood of node compromise, leading to a disruption of the legitimate network functions/services. Most reported studies in coping with the problem have focused on the effort of protection on route discovery and data transmission against various attacks. In this paper, we solve the problem from a different perspective by targeting the node compromise revocation, i.e., isolating and breaking off the misbehaving nodes. To mitigate the security breaches from internal compromised nodes and eventually eliminate compromised nodes from the wireless ad hoc networks, we propose an energy efficient malicious node removal mechanism. Further, a new attack on routing service called entrap attack is introduced, where an innocent node is incriminated as a malicious node. © 2006 IEEE.