Toward securing MANET against the energy depletion attack

Abstract

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are used by malicious nodes in order to flood a victim node with large data flows. When the victim is a communication node, these attacks aim to damage network performances by reducing its resources such as bandwidth (bandwidth depletion attack), computing power (processor depletion attack) and energy (energy depletion attack). Due to their proper characteristics (wireless and dynamic topologies, low battery life, etc.), Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) are more vulnerable than other networks and their damages can quickly became very serious. Moreover, for such networks, the energy depletion attack is obviously the most common because it makes nodes unable to process legitimate requests and traffic. It follows that for MANETs, for which such attack can be completely disabling, it is better to prevent this type of attack rather than reacting after its occurrence. The aim of this paper fits into the previous strategy: it proposes as a first part, a security mechanism preventing energy depletion attack which ties up the residual energy of a victim MANET node making it unable to process legitimate requests and consequently the needed service. The environment on which the proposition is made uses the delegation concept and extends a recently proposed reputation based clustering MANET environment organizing the network into clusters with elected cluster heads (CHs) and detecting and isolating malicious nodes.The second part of this paper concerns the formal specification of the proposed mechanism based on a certain number of constraints and its verification using adequate algorithms.