Quantifying Misbehaviour Attacks Against the Self-Organized Public Key Management on MANETs
Among the key management schemes for MANETs, the Self-Organized Public Key Management System (PGP-Like) is the main chaining-based key management scheme. It is fully self-organized and does not require any certificate authority. Two kinds of misbehavior attacks are considered to be great threats to PGP-Like: the impersonating and the lack of cooperation attacks. This work quantifies the impact of such attacks on the PGP-Like. Simulation results show that PGP-Like was able to maintain its effectiveness when submitted to the lack of cooperation attack, contradicting previously theoretical results. It correctly works even in the presence of more than 60% of misbehaving nodes, although the convergence time was affected with only 20% of misbehaving nodes. On the other hand, PGP-Like was completely vulnerable to the impersonating attack. Its functionality is affected with just 5% of misbehaving nodes, confirming previously theoretical results.