A novel robust routing scheme against rushing attacks in wireless ad hoc networks

Standard on-demand routing protocols in wireless ad hoc networks were not originally designed to deal with security threats. Because of that, malicious users have been finding ways to attack networks. Rushing attacks represent one of such possibilities. In these attacks, malicious nodes forward the Route Request (RREQ) packets, asking for a route, to the destination node quicker than the legitimate nodes do. This is possible because the legitimate nodes only forward the first received RREQ packet for a given route discovery. Besides, the attackers can tamper with either the Medium Access Control or routing protocols to get faster processing. As a result, the path through the malicious nodes is chosen, which renders throughput degradation. We propose here a novel, robust routing scheme to defend ad hoc networks against rushing attacks. Our scheme utilizes the "neighbor map mechanism" to establish robust paths as far as rushing attacks are concerned. The proposed scheme also improves path recovery delay by using, whenever it is possible, route maintenance rather than route discovery. Yet, it is energy efficient. The simulation results show that our proposal is indeed viable.