Applying formal modelling to detect DoS attacks in wireless medium

Abstract

Due to broadcast transmission and unattended nature, and hostile environments a variety of denial of service (DoS) attacks are possible in both Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and ad-hoc networks. We have developed a formal framework which can automatically verify different wireless routing protocols against DoS attacks exhaustively. In this paper we apply our formal framework against a secure ad-hoc routing protocol ARAN, which employs public cryptographic signatures as a defense against attacks. Our framework confirmed that ARAN is still vulnerable to different DoS attacks such as black hole, INA and wormhole. The framework also traces back the reason(s) as to why and how the attacks were successful.