Detection and Prevention of Blackhole Attack in the AOMDV Routing Protocol

Abstract

Mobile ad-hoc network is a collection of dynamically organized nodes where each node acts as a host and router. Mobile ad-hoc networks are characterized by the lack of preexisting infrastructures or centralized administration. So, they are vulnerable to several types of attacks, especially the Blackhole attack. This attack is one of the most serious attacks in this kind of mobile networks. In this type of attack, the malicious node sends a false answer indicating that it has the shortest path to the destination node by increasing the sequence number and decreasing the number of hops. This will have a significant negative impact on source nodes which send their data packets through the malicious node to the destination. This malicious node drops received data packets and absorbs all network traffic. In order overcome this problem, securing routing protocols become a very important requirement in mobile ad-hoc networks. Multi-path routing protocols are among the protocols affected by the Blackhole attack. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient technique that avoids misbehavior of Blackhole nodes and facilitates the discovery for the most reliable paths for the secure transmission of data packets between communicating nodes in the well known Ad hoc On-demand multi-path routing protocol (AOMDV). Our proposed technique is implemented and simulated using the well known ns 2.35 simulator. We also compared the performance of the three routing protocols AOMDV, AOMDV under Blackhole attack (BHAOMDV) and the proposed solution to counter the Blackhole attack (IDSAOMDV). The results show the degradation of performance of AOMDV under attack, it also present similarities between normal AOMDV and the proposed solution by isolating misbehaving node which has resulted in increase the performance metrics to the standard values of the AOMDV protocol.