Using trust to detect denial of service attacks in the internet of things over MANETs

Abstract

The rapid growth of employing devices as tools in daily life and the technological revolution have led to the invention of a novel paradigm; the Internet of Things (IoT). It includes a group of ubiquitous devices that communicate and share data with each other. These devices use the Internet Protocol (IP) to manage network nodes through mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). IoT is beneficial to MANET as the nodes are self-organising and the information reach can be expanded according to the network range. Due to the nature of MANET, such as dynamic topology, a number of challenges are inherent, such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. DoS attacks prohibit legitimate users from accessing their authorised services. In addition, because of the high mobility of MANET, the network can merge with other networks. In this situation, two or more networks of untrusted nodes may join one another leaving each of the networks open to attack. This paper proposes a novel method to detect DoS attacks immediately prior to the merger of two MANETs. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach, a Grayhole attack is used in this study to evaluate the performance of the proposed method in detecting attacks.