Detection of Greedy Individual and Colluding MAC Layer Attackers

Selfish behavior at the Medium Access (MAC) Layer can have devastating side effects on the performance of wireless networks, with effects similar to those of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. In this paper we consider the problem of detection and prevention of node misbehavior at the MAC layer, focusing on the back-off manipulation by selfish nodes. We propose an algorithm that ensures honest behavior of non-colluding participants. Furthermore, we analyze the problem of colluding selfish nodes, casting the problem within a minimax robust detection framework, providing a detection rule of optimum performance for the worst-case attack. Finally, we compare the effects of colluding attackers with a single attacker in terms of the detection delay. Although our approach is general and can serve as a guideline for the design of any probabilistic distributed MAC protocol, we focus our analysis on the IEEE 802.11 MAC