2nd International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy in Comunication Networks

Research Article

Detecting the Sybil Attack in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/SECCOMW.2006.359558,
        author={Chris  Piro and Clay  Shields and Brian Neil Levine},
        title={Detecting the Sybil Attack in Mobile Ad hoc Networks},
        proceedings={2nd International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy in Comunication Networks},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={SECURECOMM},
        year={2007},
        month={5},
        keywords={},
        doi={10.1109/SECCOMW.2006.359558}
    }
    
  • Chris Piro
    Clay Shields
    Brian Neil Levine
    Year: 2007
    Detecting the Sybil Attack in Mobile Ad hoc Networks
    SECURECOMM
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/SECCOMW.2006.359558
Chris Piro1,*, Clay Shields1,*, Brian Neil Levine2,*
  • 1: Dept. of Computer Science, Georgetown Univ.
  • 2: Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. Massachusetts Amherst
*Contact email: cjp23@georgetown.edu, clay@georgetown.edu, brian@cs.umass.edu

Abstract

Mobility is often a problem for providing security services in ad hoc networks. In this paper, we show that mobility can be used to enhance security. Specifically, we show that nodes that passively monitor traffic in the network can detect a Sybil attacker that uses a number of network identities simultaneously. We show through simulation that this detection can be done by a single node, or that multiple trusted nodes can join to improve the accuracy of detection. We then show that although the detection mechanism will falsely identify groups of nodes traveling together as a Sybil attacker, we can extend the protocol to monitor collisions at the MAC level to differentiate between a single attacker spoofing many addresses and a group of nodes traveling in close proximity