Securing ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing protocol against the black hole DoS attack in MANETs

Abstract

Mobile Ad hoc network is the collection of nodes without having any physical structure involved i.e. access points, routers etc. MANETs are wide-open to similar forms of threats as other wireless mobile communication systems. In Ad-hoc Network nodes performing both as end-points of the communication and routers which makes the Ad-hoc routing protocols further prone towards the security attacks. Black Hole attack is a common security issue encountered in MANET routing protocols. The Black-Hole attack is security attack in which a malicious node imposters themselves as a node with the shortest hop count to the destination node during a packet transmission. A malicious node is capable of disturbing the network with Black Hole attack pretends to have the minimum hop-count route to the destination node (DS). This node responds to all route requests (RREQ) messages in positive and thus catches all the transmission to it. The source node (SN) not knowing the malicious nature of the Black-Hole node thus transmits all the important data. The Black Hole node discards all the important data packets. In this paper a comparatively effective, efficient and easy implemented way for identifying and therefore eluding the attacks of Black-Hole in mobile Ad-hoc networks is presented. The Network Simulator (NS-2) has been used for the implementation of our proposed solution to assess its work in terms of Network Routing load, End-to-End delay and Packet delivery ratio. The results show a considerable improvement in the performance metrics.