Commerce system in a disaster area has the potential to provide electronic transactions for people purchasing recovery goods like foodstuffs, clothes, and medicine. However, to enable transactions in a disaster area, current payment systems need communication infrastructures (such as wired networks and cellular networks) which may be ruined during such disasters as large-scale earthquakes and flooding and thus cannot be depended on in a disaster area. In such a situation where the communication infrastructure is damaged, it is practically impossible to secure the commerce system or the routing protocol that may be adopted to route transactions against attacks. Therefore, to address the shortcomings of the existing systems, a secure MANET-based commerce system is proposed.
In the first part of this study, we introduce an endorsement-based mechanism to provide payment guarantees for a customer-to-merchant transaction and a multilevel endorsement mechanism with a lightweight scheme based on Bloom filter and Merkle tree to reduce communication overheads. The mobile payment system achieves secure transaction by adopting various schemes such as location-based mutual monitoring scheme and blind signature, while our newly introduced event chain mechanism prevents double spending attacks.
In addition, the second part of this study considers a monitoring-based method in the link state routing protocol to secure the packets' route against Byzantine attacks. Each node monitors the action of neighboring nodes and compares the optimal packet route against the packet route history. Nodes in the network create a packet history field which is used to record all activities of an intermediate node when receiving and forwarding packets. Also, our scheme uses a statistical method to know if a node is dropping packets intentionally by analyzing the packet dropping behavior of each node. The goal of this study is to guarantee communication among connected benign nodes in the network.