Detection and Prevention of Attacks in MANETs by Improving the EAACK Protocol

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks are dynamic in nature and have no rigid or reliable network infrastructure by their very definition. They are expected to be self-governed and have dynamic wireless links which are not entirely reliable in terms of connectivity and security. Several factors could cause their degradation, such as attacks by malicious and selfish nodes which result in data carrying packets being dropped which in turn could cause breaks in communication between nodes in the network. This paper aims to address the issue of remedy and mitigation of the damage caused by packet drops. We proposed an improvement on the EAACK protocol to reduce the network overhead packet delivery ratio by using hybrid cryptography techniques DES due to its higher efficiency in block encryption, and RSA due to its management in key cipher. Comparing to the existing approaches, our simulated results show that hybrid cryptography techniques provide higher malicious behavior detection rates, and improve the performance. This research can also lead to more future efforts in using hybrid encryption based authentication techniques for attack detection/prevention in MANETs.