DoS ATTACKER TRACEBACK IN MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS

Abstract

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and Distributed DoS attacks constitute a major security threats today. The attackers generally use IP spoofing to conceal their real locations. Several IP trace back mechanisms have been proposed for wired Internet. Such mechanisms cannot be applied directly to ad-hoc networks, because they rely on assumptions such as trustworthy routers and static route topology that do not hold in ad-hoc platform. In ad-hoc networks nodes are the devices with limited bandwidth, computational resources, battery power and unpredictable routing topology. Due to this efficient attacker trace back techniques have to be developed for the wireless ad-hoc networks and the overhead induced by these techniques on routing protocols is to be studied. In this thesis work we developed a new approach, which can efficiently trace back-to the source of the attack in ad-hoc environment and induces little overhead on routing protocols. To efficiently track down DoS attacker, we used information in both MAC and network layer. Our approach uses Traffic Pattern Matching (TPM) and Traffic Volume Matching (TVM) techniques with KS test. We also proposed efficient search technique, in-network processing and query suppression to reduce communication overhead in energy constrained MANETs and increase traceback robustness against IP spoofing, node mobility and node compromises done by attacker. We implemented traceback technique in both AODV and DSR ad hoc routing protocols and measured the overhead of our techniques on these routing protocols. We have done simulation in ns-2 by varying different simulation parameters. We varied the background traffic percentage, pause time etc and measured the success rate of our scheme. We also measured