Two-Level Secure Re-routing (TSR) in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The lack of static infrastructure, open nature and node mobility causes several issues in Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET), such as energy utilization, node authentication and secure routing. In this paper we propose a new scheme, Two-level Secure Re-routing (TSR), an attack resilient architecture for Mobile Ad hoc networks. It is significantly different from existing solutions, as it does not focus on any specific attack, but instead, taking a general approach it achieves resilience against a wide range of routing disruption DoS attacks. TSR is a double-layer scheme that detects attacks at the transport layer but responds to them at the network layer. The concept of local supervision using watch-nodes has been incorporated to make it a secure architecture. Also, because routing disruption attacks have a pronounced effect on the size of the TCP congestion window, monitoring the window size is effective in detecting such events. Using both these methods, TSR is able to detect attacks. Once an attack is detected by the local supervision, it is verified by congestion window abnormalities and only then TSR initiates a re-routing process to find a new route. Our simulation results will show how attacks can be detected and data packets are re-routed after attacks have been detected.