MISPAR: Mitigating Stealthy Packet Dropping in Locally-Monitored Multi-Hop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Local monitoring has been demonstrated as a powerful technique for mitigating security attacks in multi-hop ad-hoc networks. In local monitoring, nodes overhear partial neighborhood communication to detect misbehavior such as packet drop or delay. However, local monitoring as presented in the literature is vulnerable to a class of attacks that the authors introduce here called stealthy packet dropping. Stealthy packet dropping disrupts the packet from reaching the destination by malicious behavior at an intermediate node. However, the malicious node gives the impression to its neighbors that it performed the legitimate forwarding action. Moreover, a legitimate node comes under suspicion.