Mitigating Misleading Routing Attack using path signature in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

The growth of laptops, personal digital assistant (PDA) and 802.11/Wi-Fi wireless networking made mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) a popular research topic recently. However, the flexible deployment nature and the lack of fixed infrastructure make MANETs suffer from a variety of security attacks. We, in this paper, discuss the Misleading Routing Attack (MIRA) in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks and propose a mitigation scheme using a dynamic one-way hash chain to form a path signature to sign the path, thus allowing the nodes on the path to detect any unexpected changes occur in the path. Our simulation results show that by applying our path signature mitigation scheme, we can improve the network performance under MIRA attack in terms of packets transmission/retransmission in the network.