Countering Control Message Manipulation Attacks on OLSR

In this work we utilize a Reputation Routing Model (RRM), which we developed in an earlier work, to mitigate the impact of three different control message based blackhole attacks in Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). A malicious node can potentially introduce three types of blackhole attacks on OLSR, namely TC-Blackhole attack, HELLO-Blackhole attack and TC-HELLO-Blackhole attack, by modifying its TC and HELLO messages with false information and disseminating them in the network in order to fake its advertisement. This results in node(s) diverting their messages toward the malicious node, therefore posing great security risks. Our solution reduces the risk posed by such bad nodes in the network and tries to isolate such links by feeding correct link state information to OLSR. We evaluate the performance of our model by emulating network scenarios on Common Open Research Emulator (CORE) for static as well as dynamic topologies. From our findings, it is observed that our model diminishes the effect of all three blackhole attacks on OLSR protocol in terms of packet delivery rates, especially at static and low mobility.