Secure Route Discovery in DSR against Black Hole Attacks in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of wireless nodes communicating over multi-hop paths without any infrastructure. Nodes must cooperate to provide necessary network functionalities. The security in routing protocols like Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) can be compromised by a “Black Hole” attack. Here, a malicious node claims to have the shortest path to the destination and attracts all traffic and drops them, leading to performance degradation. The situation becomes worse when two or more nodes cooperate and perform the “Cooperative black hole” attack. This chapter proposes a solution based on probing to identify and prevent such attacks. The proposed solution discovers a secure route between the source and destination by identifying and isolating the attacking nodes. Simulation results show that the protocol provides better security and performance in terms of detection time, packet delivery ratio, and false negative probability in comparison with trust and probe based schemes.