Protecting the network layer from malicious attacks is an important and challenging security issue in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In this paper, a security mechanism is proposed to defend against a cooperative gray hole attack on the well known AODV routing protocol in MANETs. A gray hole is a node that selectively drops and forwards data packets after it advertises itself as having the shortest path to the destination node in response to a route request message from a source node. The proposed mechanism does not apply any cryptographic primitives on the routing messages. Instead, it protects the network by detecting and reacting to malicious activities of any node. Simulation results show that the scheme has a significantly high detection rate with moderate network traffic overhead.

In multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), mobile nodes cooperate with each other without using any infrastructure such as access points or base stations. Security remains a major challenge for these networks due to their features of open medium, dynamically changing topologies, reliance on cooperative algorithms, absence of centralized monitoring points, and lack of clear lines of defense. Among the various attacks to which MANETs are vulnerable, malicious packet dropping attack is very common where a malicious node can partially degrade or completely disrupt communication in the network by consistently dropping packets. In this paper, a mechanism for detection of packet dropping attack is presented based on cooperative participation of the nodes in a MANET. The redundancy of routing information in an ad hoc network is utilized to make the scheme robust so that it works effectively even in presence of transient network partitioning and Byzantine failure of nodes. The proposed scheme is fully cooperative and thus more secure as the vulnerabilities of any election algorithm used for choosing a subset of nodes for cooperation are absent. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the protocol.Index Termsdistributed algorithm, mobile ad hoc network, packet dropping attack, routing security.

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Local positioning, particularly in indoor environments, poses challenges that are not faced by global and terrestrial positioning systems. Many a times, it is cost effective to build these localization schemes on the existing wireless local area networks (WLANs). In that direction, a time-of-arrival (TOA) estimation based on the "distorted template"[1], which is obtained by convolving the clean template with the channel estimate, was proposed in our earlier work. In this paper, the scheme is further examined for different channel estimation techniques. Towards the direction of designing a complete system, the differential time difference of arrival (DTDOA) synchronization scheme is analyzed and based on the analysis, guidelines for positioning the access points is also provided.