Location verification and trust management for resilient geographic routing

In this paper, we consider the security of geographic routing (GR) protocols. In GR, neighbors exchange their location information. Based on this information, a node forwards packets to the neighbor that is closest to the destination. Although GR is widely used in ad hoc and wireless sensor networks, its security has rarely been studied; there are a number of attacks that are possible on GR. In one attack, misbehaving nodes can falsify their location information. Also, malicious nodes can drop packets that they need to forward towards the destination. The first contribution of the paper is to propose a location verification algorithm to address the attacks falsifying the location information. The second contribution of the paper is to propose approaches for trust-based multi-path routing, aiming to defeat attacks on GR. We discuss the proposed approaches in detail, outlining possible attacks and defenses against them. In addition, we show, via simulation, how trust-based route selection is able to circumvent attackers and route around them. This paper summarizes and extends results reported by the authors in a previous article K.-D.K. Nael, B. Abu-Ghazaleh, K. Liu, Towards resilient routing in WSNs, in: Proceedings of the First IEEE/ACM Workshop on QoS and Security in Wireless Networks (Q2SWinet 2005), 2005, pp. 71–78].