Secure AODV to combat black hole attack in MANET

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of autonomous nodes that communicate with each other by forming a multi-hop radio network without relying on any standard network infrastructure. Most of the routing protocols for MANETs were developed without any security measures and are thus vulnerable to various types of attacks. Ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) is a very popular routing protocol. However, it is vulnerable to the well-known black hole attack, where a malicious node falsely advertises good paths to a destination node during the route discovery process. In this paper, a defense mechanism is presented against these black hole attacks in a MANET. This method makes use of the MAC address of the destination to validate each node in its path thereby providing a direct negotiation for secure route. The simulation is carried out on the proposed scheme to demonstrate the effectiveness of the mechanism in mitigation of the attack while maintaining a reasonable level of throughput, packet delivery ratio and end to end delay in the network.