Abstract: Packet dropping attack, which is a crucial issue in networks. Link error and malicious packet dropping are two sources for packet losses. While observing a sequence of packet losses in the network, it is difficult to identify whether the loss is due to link errors or malicious nodes. Packet may be dropped during forwarding of routing information or during data forwarding. Dropping can be due to presents of malicious nodes or due to link error. Hence to improve the detection accuracy, the correlations between lost packets is identified. The proposed method is based on detecting the bitmap between the lost packets over each hop of the path. It provides a truthful and publicly verifiable decision statistics as a proof to support the detection decision. The high detection accuracy is achieved by exploiting the correlations between the positions of lost packets, as calculated from the Audit based elliptic curve cryptography (AECC) which describes the status of each packet in a sequence of packet transmission. Therefore, by detecting the correlations between the lost packets, one can decide whether the packet loss is purely due to link errors, or is a combined effect of malicious drop and link error. Audit node is used to identify the malicious node or not. The Audit management in the WSN is like usually RREQ and RREP message passing between nodes. The energy is used to distinguish between altruism and selfish node.

Keywords: Packet dropping, Secure routing, Attack detection, AECC, Auditing.