Byzantine robust trust establishment for mobile ad hoc networks

In a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), the nodes act both as traffic sources and as relays that forward packets from other nodes along multi-hop routes to the destination. Such networks are suited to situations in which a wireless infrastructure is unavailable, infeasible, or prohibitively expensive. However, the lack of a secure, trusted infrastructure in such networks make secure and reliable packet delivery very challenging. A given node acting as a relay may exhibit Byzantine behavior with respect to packet forwarding, i.e., arbitrary, deviant behavior, which disrupts packet transmission in the network. For example, a Byzantine node may arbitrarily choose to drop or misroute a certain percentage of the packets that are passed to it for forwarding to the next hop. In earlier work, we proposed a trust establishment framework, called Hermes, which enables a given node to determine the “trustworthiness” of other nodes with respect to reliable packet delivery by combining first-hand trust information obtained independently of other nodes and second-hand trust information obtained via recommendations from other nodes. A deficiency of the Hermes scheme is that a node can fail to detect certain types of Byzantine behavior, such as packet misforwarding directed at a particular source node. In this paper, we propose new mechanisms to make Hermes robust to Byzantine behavior and introduce a punishment policy that discourages selfish node behavior. We present simulation results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in a variety of scenarios involving Byzantine nodes that are malicious both with respect to packet forwarding and trust propagation.