Identifying malicious behavior in MANET through data path information

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks are increasingly deployed in military networks as well as special kinds of civil law enforcement and emergency operation domains. Compared to wired and other types of wireless networks, MANETs are particularly vulnerable to a wide range of attacks and require high security and privacy guarantees due to their critical mission. Research efforts have focused on developing secure routing protocols for MANETs but very little attention has been given to the data plane and the information we can extract about the actual communication links. Wireless networks that require high levels of security may use data path information to validate routing information. In this paper, we develop a scheme that allows us to track and validate mobile node connectivity in order to identify potential malicious behavior. We propose a novel algorithm to accomplish connectivity tracking based on a space-efficient Bloom filter data structure and the use of aggregate signatures. We present simulation results on a real network trace that show the effectiveness of our design.