An efficient detection mechanism against packet faking attack in opportunistic networks

Security is a major challenge in Opportunistic Networks (OppNets) because of its characteristics, such as open medium, dynamic topology, no centralized management and absent clear lines of defense. A packet dropping attack is one of the major security threats in OppNets since neither source nodes nor destination nodes have the knowledge of where or when the packet will be dropped. In our previous novel attack (Packet Faking Attack [1]) we presented a special type of packet dropping where the malicious node drops one or more packets and then injects new fake packets instead. In this paper, we present an efficient detection mechanism against this type of attack where each node can detect the attack instead of the destination node. Our detection mechanism is very powerful and has very high accuracy. It relies on a very simple yet powerful idea, that is, the packet creation time of each packet. Simulation results show this robust mechanism achieves a very high accuracy, detection rate and good network traffic reduction.