Enhanced Timestamp Discrepancy to Limit Impact of Replay Attacks in MANETs

Aziz Baayer, Nourddine Enneya, Mohammed Elkoutbi

Laboratory LaRIT, Faculty of Sciences, University of Ibn Tofail, Kenitra, Morocco.
Laboratory SI2M, ENSIAS, University of Mohammed-V-Souissi, Rabat, Morocco.

DOI: 10.4236/jis.2012.33028                

Abstract

Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs), characterized by the free move of mobile nodes are more vulnerable to the trivial Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks such as replay attacks. A replay attacker performs this attack at anytime and anywhere in the network by interception and retransmission of the valid signed messages. Consequently, the MANET performance is severally degraded by the overhead produced by the redundant valid messages. In this paper, we propose an enhancement of timestamp discrepancy used to validate a signed message and consequently limiting the impact of a replay attack. Our proposed timestamp concept estimates approximately the time where the message is received and validated by the received node. This estimation is based on the existing parameters defined at the 802.11 MAC layer.

Keywords

MANET; Replay Attack; Denial-of-Service (DoS); 802.11 MAC Layer; Network Allocation Vector (NAV); Security Countermeasure

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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