A Collusion Attack Against OLSR-based Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Rapid advances in wireless networking technologies have made it possible to construct a Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) which can be applied in infrastructureless situations. However, due to their inherent characteristics, MANETs are vulnerable to various kinds of attacks which aim at disrupting their routing operations. To develop a strong security scheme to protect against these attacks it is necessary to understand the possible form of attacks that may be launched. Recently, researchers have proposed and investigated several possible attacks against MANET. However, there are still unanticipated or sophisticated attacks that have not been well studied. In this paper, we present a collusion attack model against Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol which is one of the four standard routing protocols for MANETs. After analyzed the attack in detail and demonstrated the feasibility of the attack through simulations, we present a technique to detect the attack by utilizing information of two hops neighbors.