Denial of Service (DoS) attacks detection in MANETs through statistical models

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are well known to be vulnerable to various attacks, due to features such as lack of centralized control, dynamic topology, and limited physical security. Denial of Service attacks still represent a serious threat for wireless networks. These attacks not only consume the system resources but also isolate legitimate users from the network. Grayhole attack is one of these attacks, which occurs when a malicious node drop some of received data packets during the route discovery process. To detect this attack, we propose in this paper a novel approach based on two Bayesian classification models: Bernoulli and Multinomial. Several tests have been performed using NS2 simulator. Our filters prove that intentionally dropping packets can be fully detected with a low-level of false alerts.