Abstract
A Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a promising way of providing low-cost broadband Internet access. The underlying routing protocol naively assumes that all the nodes in the network are non-malicious. The open architecture of WMN, multi-hop nature of communication, different management styles, and wireless communication paves way to malicious attackers. The attackers can exploit hidden loopholes in the multipath mesh routing protocol to have a suction attack called the blackhole attack. The attacker can falsify routing metrics such as the shortest transmission time to reach any destination and thereby suck the network traffic.
We propose a novel strategy by employing mobile honeypot agents that utilize their topological knowledge and detect such spurious route advertisements. They are deployed as roaming software agents that tour the network and lure attackers by sending route request advertisements. We collect valuable information on attacker’s strategy from the intrusion logs gathered at a given honeypot. We finally evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture using simulation in ns-2.
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Prathapani, A., Santhanam, L. & Agrawal, D.P. Detection of blackhole attack in a Wireless Mesh Network using intelligent honeypot agents. J Supercomput 64, 777–804 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-010-0547-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-010-0547-3