Cross-layer Ids for Grayhole Attack in Wireless Mesh Network

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) is one of the promising technology in providing wireless internet connectivity.It contains clients and routers,where mesh routers have minimal mobility and form the backbone of WMN.They give access to network for previous clients as well as mesh.Mesh clients can be either stationary or mobile and can form a client mesh network among themselves and with mesh routers. WMN’s are anticipated to resolve the limitations and to significantly improve the performance of other networks. Since it allows faster, easy and cheaper network deployment they are becoming a popular choice. WMN applications are in broadband home networking, community etc. Security is the important aspect in WMN. Due to its open medium, dynamic topology and lack of physical security they are vulnerable to various kinds of attacks and intrusions at different layers. Security in WMN is still its infancy as very little attention has been devoted so far and so it has become vulnerable to various types of attacks. Various DoS attacks have been described.DoS attacks can compromise the availability of wireless mesh networks as it would hinder nodes from accessing or providing specific services. Gray hole is one kind of routing disturbing attacks and can bring great damage to the network.Intrusion is something which is unwanted work hindering the functions of wireless network.Wireless network is very much prey to many threats at OSI layers due to mainly cooperation among their noses Intrusion detection is a passive defense strategy to inform administrator about attacks on the network. Cross layer IDS, to accommodate the combined characterstics of link with routing information in wireless mesh networks to detect attacks on multiple layers.We choose DSR protocol to test the algorithm by ns-2 as simulation tool. Using cross layer mechanism on Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol we can detect Gray hole attack in the network.