Detection of Packet Dropping Attacks for Privacy Preservation in Wireless Ad-hoc Networks

There are usually two types of packet dropping attacks observed in the network. Link error and malicious packet dropping are the sources for packet losses in multi-hop wireless ad hoc network. In this paper, while observing a number of packet losses in the network, one should concentrate on how the packets are lost in a network, whether the packets dropped are caused by link errors only or by the combinational effect of link errors and malicious dropping. Here, particularly certain cases are displayed where it’s one of nodes in the network, whereby malicious nodes exploit their knowledge of the routing context to drop a small amount of packets that are critical to the network performance. Because the packet dropping rate in this case is similar to the channel error rate, conventional algorithms that are based on detecting the packet loss rate cannot achieve satisfactory detection accuracy. For the enhancement of the detection accuracy, a scheme to attain the interrelationships between lost packets is proposed. Furthermore, to ensure truthful calculation of these correlations, development of a Homomorphic Linear Authenticator (HLA) based public auditing architecture that allows the detector to validate the truthfulness of the packet drop information reported by nodes. This establishment is privacy preserving, collaboration proof, and incurs low communication and limited storage.