The applications of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) range from military and disaster response to commercial and civilian environments. The intrinsic characteristics like lack of infrastructure, self-organizing nature and deployment flexibility contributes to its usefulness but few other features like open media for communication and topological changes on-the-fly makes it vulnerable to security attacks. The focus of the current work is security mechanisms for a MANET against the various insider attacks targeting the data forwarding operations. It is accomplished through a trust management framework and a secure routing protocol relying upon the TMF to form the routes with most trusted nodes. The protocol computes a novel reliability metric termed as Path Allegiance metric (PAM) which acts as a selection criteria for route selection. The performance evaluation involves simulation results which prove the robustness of the proposed TMF and the effectiveness of the PAM routing protocol in reliable data delivery in the presence of packet droppers which disrupt the data transmission.
A Distributed Trust Management Framework for Detecting Malicious Packet Dropping Nodes in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network