A comprehensive taxonomy of schemes to detect and mitigate blackhole attack and its variants in MANETs

Abstract

Abstract Mobile Ad hoc Network due to its intrinsic properties of mobility, infrastructure-less working and vulnerability of underlined standard routing protocols is exposed to various packet drop attacks such as blackhole attack, grayhole attack and co-operative blackhole attack. These attacking nodes participate actively in the route establishment process and when a path is established between two end nodes through these nodes, these nodes drop the data packets according to a pattern related to the type of attack. So, security of the network communication is a very critical issue and must be handled with greater efficiency and effectiveness. A lot of research has been carried out to detect and mitigate the effects of blackhole attack and its variants in MANET. In this paper, Different variants of blackhole attack are discussed along with shortcomings of present literature. We present a comprehensive taxonomy of the mitigation and detection mechanism along with summarization and comparison of some published work related to those categories. There are in total sixteen different categories of mitigation mechanism and we have reviewed and summarized ninety one research works related to the presented categories on various parameters like overhead, base protocol, modification in base routing protocol, detection type, nature, features and limitations.