Malicious Nodes Detection in MANETs: Behavioral Analysis Approach

The increased popularity and usage of wireless technologies has opened the doors for new emerging applications in the domain of networking. One emerging and promising areas is the domain of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). A mobile ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes that form a dynamic network without the need for infrastructure or centralized points. The dynamic nature of ad hoc networks presents many security challenges. Secure routing is a promising area for achieving better security for the network by protecting the routing protocols against malicious attacks. Several secure routing protocols have been proposed in the literatures that were successful in avoiding and preventing some types of security attacks in MANETs. However, MANETs are still vulnerable to other types of attacks. Hence, there is a need for introducing an efficient mechanism to detect malicious nodes. In this paper, a new mechanism is proposed that improves the performance of routing protocol against the malicious attacks. Since a malicious node behaves in abnormal ways, this mechanism proposes observing nodes behavior such as nodes’ mobility, and avoiding communication through these nodes which may lead to more secure routing.