185 / 2016-12-26 12:15:32

Mitigating Selective Gray Hole Attack in Wireless Multi-hop Network

Gray hole attack, Selective forwarding attack, Selective Gray hole attack, Wireless multi-hop networks

Security is a primary concern in any wireless communication as it is vulnerable to different kinds of security attacks. In this paper, we focus on a special type of Selective Forwarding Attack (SFA)/ Gray Hole Attack. A network is said to be under Gray Hole Attack when a malicious node drops intentionally a subset of the data packets it received and forwards the rest to its neighbor. It is a challenge to distinguish between normal activity and malicious activity, due to the inherent loss present in the wireless medium. Most of the existing studies on gray hole attack concentrated on malicious node detection and countering the attack, when the node behaves malicious irrespective of the Source or Destination. In this paper, we make an attempt to detect a node which performs SFA on packets forwarded by a certain node or forwarded to a particular node say Gateway and not for others. In other words, we discuss a special case of SFA-termed as Selective Gray Hole Attack(SGHA), wherein the compromised node is selectively malicious for certain data flow(s). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time such an attack is discussed and countered. This attack is very crucial in military related applications and is also highly capable of disrupting the communication of a particular node with the outside world. The algorithm is so designed that the malicious node if near to gateway are detected quick enough so that packet delivery rate of the network is not much affected