How to achieve reliable routing has always been a major issue in the design of communication networks, among which mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) possess the most adversarial networking environment due to the absence of fixed infrastructure, the nature of open transmission media and the dynamic network topology. These characteristics also make the design of routing protocols in MANETs become even more challenging. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary self-cooperative trust (ESCT) scheme that imitates human cognitive process and relies on trust-level information to prevent various routing disruption attacks. In this scheme, mobile nodes will exchange trust information and analyze received trust information based on their own cognitive judgment. Eventually, each node dynamically evolves its cognition to exclude malicious entities. The most attractive feature of ESCT is that they cannot compromise the system even if the internal attackers know how the security mechanism works. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of ESCT scheme under various routing disruption attack situations. Simulation results affirm that ESCT scheme promotes network scalability and ensures the routing effectiveness in the presence of routing disruption attackers in MANETs.

Data delivery in opportunistic networks requires robustness and resiliency due to the mobility and the probabilistic propagation of the channels caused by fading. The store-carry-forward (SCF) based routing has become a conventional data forwarding mechanism in such networks. Due to the information dissemination nature of SCF routing, information epidemics control has become a necessary mechanism in SCF routing to prevent from the epidemics outbreak. In this paper, we propose an information epidemics control approach which provides earlier control signal distribution time and faster recovery rate for the data delivery solutions in opportunistic networks. We study the effectiveness of the proposed scheme based on the susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model and prove that it provides a higher vaccination rate and recovery rate. Due to the flexibility of the proposed scheme, it can be integrated with any SCF-based routing. We integrate the proposed vaccinating mechanism in a SCF-based routing and show that a robust data delivery is achieved and a substantial amount of unnecessary transmissions are well deterred.

Network coding has been introduced as a new paradigm for network routing protocols in recent years. The wide range of advantages of network coding, such as energy saving, throughput improvement and congestion mitigation, have been demonstrated in many practical systems. However, the nature of packet mixing, optimization of forwarding nodes selection cause the network coding based routing protocols vulnerable to routing attacks. In this paper, we conduct a detailed analysis of various security threats that attack on different components of intra-flow network coding based routing schemes, and provide an extensive simulation study of their impacts on the network performance. An adequate understanding of both threats and vulnerabilities of current network coding systems are essential to effectively design of defense mechanism. This paper is served as a preliminary guide in the effort of achieving security for network coding based wireless routing.

It is challenging to design a routing scheme that can successfully operate in the presence of adversarial environment in mobile ad hoc network (MANET), where several types of severe routing security threats can be easily employed against normal routing. Among them, active black hole attack is a typical one. Most existing defense schemes postulated that active black hole attackers have no knowledge about the internal prevention mechanisms of MANETs. However, due to the open and self-organized nature of MANET, it is necessary to assume that all nodes, including attackers, know how the security mechanism works. In this paper, we propose a distributed self-checking scheme that can effectively prevent various forms of active black hole attackers. Even the internal attackers who know the security mechanism cannot get any benefit to launch those attacks. Simulation results affirm that our proposed solution is robust and able to improve the packet delivery ratio significantly in an adversarial MANET environment as compared with other routing schemes. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper, we propose a new routing protocol called hybrid opportunistic routing (HOR) which takes the advantage of broadcast nature of wireless medium and replication-based data forwarding. The data packets are transmitted by broadcast-based forwarding if the destination node is within two-hop distance from sender or by replication-based forwarding otherwise. By exploiting overhearing opportunity, nodes can build up knowledge about data packets. The adaptive nature of data forwarding and overhearing capability provide high data delivery with minimum buffer requirement in highly dynamic MANET. Simulation results prove that 1) proposed scheme increases data delivery by above 30% compared to traditional MANET routing and 2) it can achieve 98% data delivery with 17% of the total packets for buffer space compared to replication-based routing which requires 50% of the total packets for buffer space to maintain 89% of data delivery.