Trust Worthy Content Based Routing in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Abstract

This thesis proposes a trust based security model suitable for content-basedrouting in Ad-hoc networks. The trust model is developed by listening to incoming and outgoing messages in passive mode. Knowledge of how these messages are modified is used to update trust tables. This work looks at a number of attacks in such network, for example, predicate modification and proximity modification. For message forwarding these trust tables are used to decide which messages need to be ignored or forwarded depending on threshold trust levels in the tables, thus developing a trust mechanism. The main finding for the research shows that all nodes which are malicious are identified over time; however, there is a high number of false positives for predicate modifications. This is an area for future research.