This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON DEPEDABLE AND SECURE COMPUTING 1 Mechanism Design-Based Secure Leader Elec

In this paper, we study leader election in the presence of selfish nodes for intrusion detection in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). To balance the resource consumption among all nodes and prolong the lifetime of an MANET, nodes with the most remaining resources should be elected as the leaders. However, there are two main obstacles in achieving this goal. First, without incentives for serving others, a node might behave selfishly by lying about its remaining resources and avoiding being elected. Second, electing an optimal collection of leaders to minimize the overall resource consumption may incur a prohibitive performance overhead, if such an election requires flooding the network. To address the issue of selfish nodes, we present a solution based on mechanism design theory. More specifically, the solution provides nodes with incentives in the form of reputations to encourage nodes in honestly participating in the election process. The amount of incentives is based on the Vickrey, Clarke, and Groves (VCG) model to ensure truth-telling to be the dominant strategy for any node. To address the optimal election issue, we propose a series of local election algorithms that can lead to globally optimal election results with a low cost. We address these issues in two possible application settings, namely, Cluster-Dependent Leader Election (CDLE) and Cluster-Independent Leader Election (CILE). The former assumes given clusters of nodes, whereas the latter does not require any preclustering. Finally, we justify the effectiveness of the proposed schemes through extensive experiments.