Mitigate Lying and On-Off Attacks on Trust Based Group Key Management Frameworks in MANETs

Instant collaborative group communication can be achieved by deploying Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (or MANETs) without any pre-plan and pre-existing infrastructure setup. However, the curbs thrown by these networks, motivate the necessity of a group key management framework to secure data traffic. In this context, significant research work done in the last decade and proved that the trust based frameworks deliver better performance than others. In MANETs, trust quantified as the belief held by a node about another node. It is evaluated based on the assessing node direct experiences with assessed node itself, if they are neighbors and recommendations from remote nodes in the network with which assessed node has a direct experience, if they are remote. However, the framework based on recommendations by other nodes in the network might ultimately lead to system failure due to the menace of unfair recommendations by selfish and malicious nodes. Lying and on-off attacks on the system are such type of attacks. This motivates us to work on a framework which is immune to aforesaid attacks and should be lightweight due to node's has limited computing resources. We propose a framework which scrutinizes dishonest recommendations based on the trust threshold value of remote nodes, distance from mean of trust recommendations and by maintaining a history of recommendations. Our simulation outcomes prove that proposed framework can deliver better network performance and resistance to lying and on-off attacks.