A collaborative defense protocol against collaborative attacks in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh network is an evolving next generation multi-hop broadband wireless technology. Collaborative attacks are more severe at the transport layer of such networks where the transmission control protocol's three-way handshake process is affected with the intention to bring the network down by denying its services. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative defense protocol (CDP) which uses a handshake-based verification process and a collaborative flood detection and reaction process to effectively carry out the defense. This protocol presents a group of monitors that collaboratively entail in defending the attack; thus reduces the burden on a single monitor. Moreover, this paper proposes a novel transport layer post-connection flooding attack that occurs after establishing a TCP connection and we show that CDP can detect and mitigate this attack. The CDP protocol has been implemented in Java and its performance has been evaluated using essential metrics. We show that CDP is efficient and reliable and it can identify the attack before any major damage has occurred.