TRUST VALUE ALGORITHM: A SECURE APPROACH AGAINST PACKET DROP ATTACK IN WIRELESS AD-HOC NETWORKS

International Journal of Network Security & Its Applications (IJNSA), Vol.5, No.3, May 2013

DOI : 10.5121/ijnsa.2013.5309 99

TRUST VALUE ALGORITHM: A SECURE
APPROACH AGAINST PACKET DROP ATTACK IN
WIRELESS AD-HOC NETWORKS
Rajendra Aaseri1
, Pankaj Choudhary2
, Nirmal Roberts3
ABV-Indian Institute of Information Technology, Gwalior, India
{jmsrdjbr1
, pschoudhary0072
, nirmal.roberts3
}@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Wireless ad-hoc networks are widely used because these are very easy to deploy. However, there are
various security issues and problems. Two most important issues are interoperability and interaction
among various security technologies which are very important to consider for configuration and
management point of view. The packet drop ratio in the wireless network is very high as well as packets
may be easily delayed by the attacker. Ii is very difficult to detect intruders, so it results into high false
positive rate. Packets may be dropped or delayed by intruders as well as external nodes in wireless
networks. Hence, there is the need of effective intrusion detection system which can detect maximum
number of intruders and the corresponding packets be forwarded through some alternate paths in the
network. In this paper we propose an alternate solution to detect the intruders/adversary with help of trust
value. It would remove the need of inbuilt IDS in the wireless networks and result into improving the
performance of WLAN.
KEYWORDS
Intrusion detection System (IDS), False Positive Rate (FPR), Intruders, WLAN, AODV.
1. INTRODUCTION
With growth of wireless local area networks [1], the dilemma of wireless security becomes more
and more rigorous. There are many security issues in the wireless local area networks (WLAN)
that must be considered in the formation of safe and sound WLAN. Widespread types of wireless
security methods are Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). WEP
is solitary the slightest secure forms of security whereas WPA can be applied through firmware
upgrades on wireless network interface cards designed for WEP. Wireless ad-hoc networks are
self-possessed of self-governing nodes that are self-managed without any infrastructure. In this
style, ad-hoc networks encompass a dynamic topology to facilitate nodes to smoothly add or
delete the network components at any time. While the nodes communicate with each other
without an infrastructure, they offer the connectivity by forwarding packets over themselves. To
extend this connectivity, nodes bring into play some routing protocols such as AODV (Ad-hoc
On-Demand Distance Vector), DSDV (Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector) and DSR
(Dynamic Source Routing) [2]. Since wireless ad-hoc networks involve no infrastructure [3], they
are susceptible to a variety of attacks. One of these attacks is the Black Hole attack, also known as
Packet Drop Attack. In the Packet Drop Attack, a nasty node absorbs the entire data packets in
itself like a sink, which suck up all the incoming routing traffic into it. In this manner, all
incoming packets are dropped. A malicious node exploits this vulnerability of the route sighting
packets of the on demand protocols, for example AODV. In route finding progression of AODV
protocol, transitional nodes are liable to find a new path to the destination. A wireless intrusion
detection system (WIDS) monitors the radio range [4] used by wireless LANs, and
instantaneously alerts system administrators on every occasion a suspected malicious entrance is

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detected. Rogue campaign can spoof MAC address of an authoritative network device as its own.
The prime function of a WIPS is to suppress rogue network entrance to the LAN. Both these
techniques are frequently applied as a protection to the Wireless LAN. These techniques are
normally used for isolation of private network from the public network. However, these are found
to be not very suitable for intrusion from within the private network.
2. PREVIOUS WORK
The security exertion and security threats in the wireless networks are increasing, particularly in
varied-frightening hazard, such as hacker attacks, worms, Trojans, DOS attacks etc. being serious
troubles to the user. To tackle this problem, a new scheme: WBIPS (WTLS-Based IPS) replica is
proposed. In this model, a coherent solitary path is build connecting each wireless terminal and its
destination. Therefore an IPS engine can spot and reduce the cost for user. In WBIPS, a WTLS-
based VPN (Virtual Private Network) [5] [6] is set up, and by a WTLS tunnel, wireless terminal
can connect to a remote IPS engine. All traffics pass on to the engine and subsequently to their
destinations.
A Lightweight WTLS-Based Intrusion Prevention Scheme is proposed by Dong Lijun, Yu
Shengsheng and Xia Tao Liao Rongtao [7]. In IPS, firewall is strongly fixed with IDS, and IPS
machine is positioned in same path through which all traffics pass. WTLS (Wireless Transport
Layer Security) is the security layer of the WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) [8]. In this
approach, the hazardous traffics can be prohibited immediately. IPS requires firewall to work
with IDS. Wireless networks do not meet the extent of intensity of security as in wired networks.
The entire traffics pass on to the engine and subsequently to their destinations. It gives the
impression that an IPS engine is located in the path of wireless terminal's traffics. All connections
are detected and checked by WBIPS.
Yaohui Wang, Xiaobo Huang (2010) proposed Analysis of Intrusion Management System
Technology [9]. In this paper, the authors introduce an invasion supervision system, which can
constitute for these deficiencies. Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is a fast growth kind of
security object which follows the firewall. By examination of the network traffic, it discovers the
network system if it has a breach of security strategy and attack symbols. It categorizes intrusion,
prohibits network traffic if required and notifies in real-time. When it discovers the attack, it not
only files the record and the alarm, but also alerts the administrator of dynamic protection
approach to attain appropriate counter measure, and enable the emergency repair to restore the
system in a sensible way.
Chuang Wang, Taiming Feng, Jinsook Kim, Guiling Wang (2012) proposed some techniques for
catching packet droppers and modifiers in Wireless Networks [10]. To deal with packet droppers,
an extensively approved alternate approach is multipath forwarding [11], [12], [13], [14], in
which every packet is forwarded along multiple surplus paths. Consequently packet drops in a
few but not the all of these paths can be established. To deal with packet modifiers, most of
existing countermeasures [15], [16], [17], [18] aim to filter modified messages en-route within a
certain number of hops. These countermeasures can tolerate or mitigate the packet dropping and
modification attacks, but the intruders are still there and can continue attacking the network
without being caught.
3. PACKET DROP ATTACK IN WIRELESS AD-HOC NETWOK
Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) Routing Protocol is used for discovery of a path to
the target in wireless ad-hoc networks [19]. When the source node requests to create an
association with the destination node, it televises an RREQ message. In ad-hoc networks that

101

employ the AODV protocol, the intruder node suck up the network passage and fall all the
corresponding packets. To explain the Packet Drop Attack, we include a malicious node that
demonstrates Black Hole activities in the set-up. We illustrate the packet drop attack with help of
given scenario shown in Figure 1. We suppose that Node 3 is the malicious node. When Node 1
televise the RREQ message for Node 4, Node 3 immediately responds to Node 1 with an RREP
message that contain the maximum sequence number of Node 4, as if it is coming from Node 4.
Node 1 presumes that Node 4 is following Node 3 with 1 hop and discards the recently arrived
RREP packet coming from Node 2. Subsequently, Node 1 begin to discharge its data packet to the
node 3 expecting that these packets will arrive at Node 4 but Node 3 will slump all data packets.
In a Packet Drop Attack, after a while, the starting nodes realize that there is a linkage fault since
the acceptance node refusing to transmit TCP ACK packets. If it dispatch away fresh TCP data
packets and find out a fresh route for the target, the malicious node still handle to cheat the
sending node. If the sending node releases UDP data packets, the difficulty is not identified since
the UDP data connections do not hang around for the ACK packets.
Figure 1: Demonstration of Packet Drop Attack [19]
4. PROBLEM FORMULATION AND PROPOSED SCHEME
Wireless networks are very easy to deploy because there is no need to establish any physical path.
This feature of wireless network results into birth of various attacks. In the Packet drop attack, the
attacker targets some nodes in the wireless network and then drop the packets sent towards the
intended nodes. Attackers try to drop/delay the packets in the routine manner so it’s very difficult
to detect. The packet drop will further results into the high false positive rates and ultimately

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breaks the security of wireless networks. So, our problem is to detect the Packet drop attack and
try to reduce the packet drop ratio so that it will result into law false positive rates.
4.1 PROPOSED ALGORITHM
If the number of packet drop nodes increases then the data thrashing would also likely to be boost
[5]. A malicious node can initiate the following two attacks:
PACKET SINKING: A malicious node slump all or a few of the packets that is believed to be
forward. It can also sink the data produced by itself on behalf of some malicious intention for
instance.
PACKET AMENDMENT: A malicious node alters the entire or a few of the data packets that
is made-up to forward. It can also modify the data it produce to defend it from being recognized
or to lay blame on former nodes.
In previous Black hole detection techniques, black hole node is randomly chosen based on the
number of packet dropped. So, sometime legitimate user also treated as the intruders or attacker.
It will result into high false positive rate and it violates the security of wireless networks.
TRUST VALUE ALGORITHM: The proposed algorithm is based on the trust values of
individual nodes. Initially, all the nodes of wireless ad-hoc network have zero trust value. The
algorithm comprises the following steps:
[A] Initialization:
1. Trust values of all the participating nodes are initializing with zero.
2. Initialize the threshold value of the trust value with 100.
3. Assumption: 1 trust value = 10 packets dropped.
[B] Updating of trust values:
1. If the packets are correctly transmitted from one node to another node:
(a) If the correctly transmitted number of packets is between 1 to 10, then trust values
of the respective nodes will be incremented by one time.
Updated trust value = old trust value + 1;
(b) If the correctly transmitted number of packets are greater than 10, then the updated
trust value will be:
Updated trust value = old trust value + (correctly transmitted packets / 10);
2. If the packets are dropped/delayed :
(a) The number of dropped or delayed packets is between 1 to 10, then trust value of
that particular node is decremented by one.
Updated trust value = old trust value – 1;
(b) The number of dropped or delayed packets are greater than 10, then trust value of
that particular node will be,
Updated trust value = old trust value – (Packet dropped or delayed / 10);
3. If the trust value of particular node is negative, then print “Invalid node”.

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[C] Isolating the Packet drop node from the network:
1. If (Updated trust value <<< Threshold trust value)
Then the particular node is treated as malicious node (Black hole node)
2. If (Updated trust value > Threshold trust value)
Then the particular node is treated as legitimate node.
3. Stop comparing the trust values of nodes with threshold value.
In our approach, we detect the black hole node based on the trust values (Proposed trust value
algorithm). We used Traffic pattern Analysis Techniques and associate trust values with each
wireless nodes. Initially, all nodes has 'zero' trust value. If the particular node is not involving in
packet drops, then each time the trust value of corresponding node will increase by 1.
When a particular node reaches its trust value equal or more than threshold value then that node
will be treated as legitimate node for further communication. In this manner we calculated trust
value of each and every node. If particular node is not attaining its trust value to the threshold
then it will be treated as the packet dropper/modifier node and it will be called as illegal node for
further communication. Reduction in the packet drop ratio will result into the low false positive
rates and ultimately it will result into the improved security of WLAN.
5. SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENT
In this effort, we have tried to assess the special effects of the Packet Drop attacks in the Wireless
Ad-hoc Networks. To attain this we have replicated the wireless ad-hoc network set-up which
contains packet drop node using NS2 Network Simulator program. To create the packet drop
node in a wireless ad-hoc network we have employed fresh protocol that jump down data packets
after be a magnet for them to itself.
TABLE 1: SIMULATION PARAMETERS
Parameter Specification
Simulation tools Used NS2 Network Simulator (NS 2.35), Exata
Simulation Time 10 sec, 20 sec
Number of Nodes 20,40,60,80,100
Transmission Range 250 m
Maximum Speed 0-22 m/sec
Application Traffic CBR(Constant Bit Rate) [20]
Packet Size 512 Bytes
Node Mobility Model 8 Packets/sec
Protocol AODV
Number of runs 12
Threshold trust value 100
To obtain correct results from the simulations, we applied UDP protocol. The source node
remains on carriage out UDP packets, although the nasty node goes down them, while the node
terminates the link if it makes use of TCP protocol. As a result, we may possibly examine the
connection flow between sending node and receiving node throughout the simulation.

104

5.1 SIMULATION SET UP AND NETWORK SCENARIO
NS2 Simulator generates a tcl (Tool Command Language) file. On running the tcl file, it results
into two more files, first the trace file which contains all the information regarding the network
and second the nam (Network animator) file which is a visual aid showing how packets flow
along the network and shows the Virtualization of the network corresponding to the trace file. All
routing protocols in NS2 are mounting in the directory of “ns-2.35”.
We begin the simulation by duplicate AODV protocol in this directory and alter the name of
directory as “packetdropaodv”. We create a tiny size network that has seven nodes and generate a
UDP link connecting Node 2 and Node 5, and affix CBR (Constant Bit Rate) function that
produce constant packets in the course of the UDP connection. Duration of the scenarios is 20
seconds and the CBR connections taking place at time equals to 1.0 seconds and carry on until the
end of the simulation.
5.2 EVALUATION OF SIMULATION
Figure 2: Data stream between Node 2 and Node 5 through Node 1 and Node 6
We cannot easily see the effects of the Black Hole AODV Node in the large number of Nodes and
connections, we will carry out in the actual simulation, and we had to test the implementation in a
small sized simulation that has a small number of nodes.

105

Figure 3: Data stream between Node 2 and Node 5 through Node 3 and Node 4
Figure 4: Node 0 (Black Hole Node) suck up the connection between Node 2 to Node 5

106

6. ANALYSIS OF SIMULATION RESULTS
We simulated 10 different network scenarios having different number of nodes. We observe the
simulation results to get the values of various network parameters like throughput, Packet drop
ratio (PDR), Packet delivery ratio (PDLR), Average trust value and false positive rate (FPR).
Various graphs are plotted to observe the relationship between these parameters.
TABLE 2: EXPERIMENT DATA WITH 10 DIFFERENT SCENARIOS
Scenario Nodes Throughput
(mbps)
FPR PDR Avg. trust value PDLR
1 10 2.793 0.013 0.013 91.42 0.987
2 20 2.923 0.042 0.019 85.63 0.967
3 30 2.897 0.061 0.027 81.03 0.943
4 40 2.453 0.097 0.074 76.45 0.912
5 50 2.307 0.153 0.156 72.09 0.893
6 60 2.109 0.196 0.162 71.73 0.796
7 70 2.908 0.173 0.159 72.95 0.776
8 80 2.003 0.237 0.204 69.78 0.709
9 90 1.459 0.214 0.193 70.05 0.698
10 100 1.763 0.349 0.297 63.50 0.635
PDLR: Packet delivery ratio PDR: Packet drop ratio FPR: False positive rate
Figure 5 shows the variation of throughput with the packet drops. We observe that as the number
of packet drop increases, corresponding throughput decreases. Figure 6 shows the variation of
throughput with the false positive rate (FPR). Throughput shows the tendency to reduce with
increasing false positive rate (FPR). Figure 7 shows the variation of throughput against packet
delivery ratio. Here, the throughput increases with increasing packet delivery ratio. Figure 8
shows that the FPR also increases as the PDR increases.
Figure 9 shows the effect of PDR on the trust values. It clearly implies that as the PDR increases
the trust value deceased in an almost linear way. The node which acquires its trust value equal to
or more than the threshold value is considered a legitimate node. Figure 10 shows the effect of
FPR on the trust values. Here, FPR decreases with increasing the trust values in an almost linear
way. As the average trust value tends to threshold value, it results into low false positive rate. i.e.
there is high chance of detection of the malicious node and ultimately it will result into the
improved security of WLAN.

107

Figure 5: Throughput Vs Packet dropped
Figure 6: Throughput Vs False Positive Rate

108

Figure 7: Throughput Vs Packet delivery ratio
Figure 8: False Positive Rate Vs Packet Drop Ratio

109

Figure 9: Packet Drop Ratio Vs Trust value
Figure 10: False Positive Rate Vs Trust value

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7. CONCLUSIONS
After simulating the packet drop attack, we observe that the packet loss is higher in the ad-hoc
network. If the number of packet drop Nodes is enlarged then the data loss would also be likely to
mount. AODV network has generally 5.79% data loss and if a packet drop node is introduced in
this network, data loss is enlarged to 87.45 %. As 5.79 % data loss previously survives in this data
traffic, Packet drop node boosts this data loss by 81.66 %. Malicious nodes, in the wireless ad-hoc
networks are detected on the basis of their corresponding trust values with assist of our proposed
trust value algorithm. Our Approach can detect malicious node with 87% of success which further
results into data security (decrease in data loss) by 75.69%. So, Our Approach solves the problem
of Packet drop attack with 92% of the success which is far better than the earlier prevention
technique to packet drop attack.
8. FUTURE WORK
In our work, we simulated the Packet Drop Attack in the Wireless Ad-hoc Networks using AODV
routing protocol and examine its influence. Similarly, other routing protocols could be simulated
as well. Simulation results for different routing protocols are likely to present varied, interesting
and thought provoking conclusions. Thus, the best routing protocol for minimizing the Packet
Drop Attack may be determined.
With help of our proposed Trust Value Algorithm the black hole node can be detected based on
the trust values which will result into the low false positive rates. We used UDP connection to
calculate the packets at sending and receiving nodes. If we had used the TCP connection among
nodes, the sending node would be the end of the connection, since ACK packets do not arrive at
the sending node. The discovery the black hole node with connection oriented protocols could be
another future work.
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