Mitigating control plane attacks on TDMA-based MAC protocols in mobile wireless networks

The broadcast nature of mobile wireless networks makes these types of networks more vulnerable to attacks by compromised or malicious nodes in the neighborhood of other nodes. In particular, a control plane attack against MAC layers can disrupt a node´s association with its neighbor nodes and thereby cause the node to become isolated from the rest of the network. We focus on three potential MAC layer threat models for a TDMA-based wireless ad-hoc network. To cope with these threat models, two distributed mitigation schemes are proposed and evaluated under practical military network scenarios in terms of network outage, packet drop rate, and throughput. The results show that these mitigation schemes enable the network performance under attack to recover close to the normal operation. The recovery is achieved by filtering out control messages responsible for the MAC attacks with minimal overhead.