Collaborative security architecture for black hole attack prevention in mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

An ad hoc network is a group of wireless mobile computers (or nodes) wherein individual nodes cooperate by forwarding packets for each other to allow nodes to communicate beyond direct wireless transmission range. The Black hole attack is an important problem that could happen easily in ad hoc networks especially in popular on-demand protocols like the ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV). Prior research in ad hoc networking has generally looked into the routing problem in a non-adversarial network setting, assuming a reasonably trusted environment. This paper proposes a collaborative architecture to detect and exclude malicious nodes that act in groups or alone. The focus is on the network layer, using the ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) protocol as an example. This paper describes an extension to the watchdog method to incorporate a collaborative architecture to tackle collusion among nodes.