A cross layer attack against MANET cooperation enforcement tools

Composed of mobile nodes, MANETs rely on the entire collaboration of nodes to provide routing and forwarding functions. Many solutions have been proposed to enforce the collaboration of nodes in MANETs. Most of them rely on monitoring mechanisms to detect selfish or malicious behaviors. These mechanisms have in common the implicit use of MAC layer information in their detection process. This paper presents a new attack scheme against MANET monitoring tools. Our attack scheme takes advantage of MAC layer absence of authentication to spoof the identity of honest nodes and ruin their reputations. Simulations have been carried out to evaluate the potential of the attack on current cooperation mechanisms. Results emphasize the high vulnerability of current monitoring mechanisms and underline the necessity for cooperation enforcement tools to rely only on authenticated information.