Game theoretic modeling of gray hole attacks in wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

Wireless ad hoc networks rely on the cooperation of participating nodes to undertake activities such as routing. Malicious nodes participating in the network may refuse to forward packets and instead discard them to mount a denial-of-service attack called a packet drop or blackhole attack. Blackhole attacks can however be easily detected using common networking tools like trace route as all packets passing through the malicious node is dropped. A gray hole attack on the other hand accomplishes denial of service by selectively dropping packets thus escaping detection. In this paper, a novel two player incomplete information extensive form game is used to model the defender and the attacker both of whom are considered rational agents in an effort to determine their optimal (equilibrium) strategies under different values for the parameters true detection rate, false alarm rate, packet value, packets forwarded per unit time, probability of the node being a gray hole, cost of exposure of the attacker and cost of not using a node for the defender. The respective equilibrium strategies if followed guarantee maximum possible protection for the defender and maximal possible damage potential for the attacker. © Springer India 2017.