Blockchain-based Model Against selfish Attacks in Mobile ad hoc Networks

Abstract

Over the past several decades, the importance of security has been increasing, in particular in the area of research addressing the Internet of Things (IoT) and, implicitly, ad hoc networks since they are part of it. Researchers have adopted blockchain as an interesting and trendy research topic in the wireless ad hoc environment. Due to its strong characteristics, such as consensus, immutability, finality and provenance, it’s used not only as a secure data storage for critical data, but also as a platform that facilitates trustless data exchange between independent parties. However, the main challenge of applying blockchain in an ad hoc network is what kind of nodes should be involved in the validation process and how to adopt the heavy computational complexity of block validation in an appropriate way while maintaining its authentic characteristics. In this paper, we propose a new blockchain-based model against selfish attacks in ad hoc networks and optimize it in this context, to this end, we investigate the presence of MPR nodes to adapt and integrate the blockchain principle in MANETs and based on this we conduct a security analysis to evaluate our model by discussing the ability of our model to meet major security issues related to confidentiality, integrity, availability, non-repudiation, and vulnerability to attacks.