Optimal Byzantine Attacker Identification Based on Game Theory in Network Coding Enabled Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Byzantine attack is a severe security concern in network coding enabled wireless ad hoc networks, because the malicious nodes can easily inject bogus packets into the information flow and cause an epidemic propagation of pollution. In this paper, we address the Byzantine attack by proposing a malicious node identification scheme, which can achieve a high identification accuracy on malicious nodes and protect the benign nodes from being mis-identified as attackers. We consider two practical challenges, namely, 1) only a fraction of the intermediate nodes can be deployed as defenders; and 2) the malicious nodes are intelligent-they pretend to be legitimate nodes probabilistically to reduce the chances of being identified. Theoretical analysis and extensive simulations show that our scheme performs well even under the conditions mentioned above. Furthermore, we conduct a series of comparisons between our scheme and several existing schemes, which show that our scheme outperforms them in both identification accuracy and valid throughput during the identification procedure. Finally, we present a two-player game theory framework to find the optimal strategy for the defender, and also provide a case study of the defender's strategy optimization.