A repeated game approach for analyzing the collusion on selective forwarding in multihop wireless networks

In multihop wireless networks (MWNs), the selective forwarding attack is a special case of denial of service attack. In this attack, the malicious wireless nodes only forward a subset of the received packets, but drop the others. This attack becomes more severe if multiple attackers exist and collude together to disrupt the normal functioning of the secure protocols. By colluding, each attacker can even only drop a little packets, but the overall loss of the path will be high. However, most prior researches on selective forwarding attacks assume the attackers do not collude with each other. Furthermore, the previous works also lack of comprehensive security analysis. In this paper, by utilizing the game theoretic approach, we analyze the collusion in selective forwarding attacks. We first put forward a sub-route oriented punish and reward scheme, and propose an multi-attacker repeated colluding game. Then by static and dynamic analysis of this colluding attack game, we find the sub-game equilibriums which indicate the attackers' optimal attack strategies. Based on the analysis result, we establish a security policies for multihop wireless networks, to threaten and detect the malicious insider nodes which collude with each other to launch the selective forwarding attacks. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.