Non-Cooperative Games Between Legitimate Nodes and Malicious Coalitions in MANETs

Security for Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) is a critical and thoroughly examined scientific area that has attracted the interest of many researchers. Many countermeasures against compromised or selfish nodes consider Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). In this paper, the authors use game theory to model non-cooperative security games between a MANET, which is defended by IDS operating at each node as well as a group of collaborative malicious nodes called malicious coalition. The paper innovates by finding the defend and attack probability distributions, of any MANET and malicious coalition, that maximise the utility of the players at the Nash Equilibrium (NE) of a non-cooperative security game between the aforementioned entities.