Detection and Prevention of Blackhole Attack in the AOMDV Routing Protocol

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 drop 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. Multipath 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). We implement and simulate our proposed technique using the ns 2.35 simulator. We also compared on how the three routing protocols AOMDV, AOMDV under Blackhole attack (BHAOMDV), and the proposed solution to counter the Blackhole attack (IDSAOMDV) performs. The results show the degradation on how AOMDV under attack performs, it also presents 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

Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Issues and Challenges

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an emerging technology that shows great promise for various futuristic applications both for mass public and military. The sensing technology combined with processing power and wireless communication makes it lucrative for being exploited in abundance in future. The inclusion of wireless communication technology also incurs various types of security threats. The intent of this paper is to investigate the security related issues and challenges in wireless sensor networks. We identify the security threats, review proposed security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks. We also discuss the holistic view of security for ensuring layered and robust security in wireless sensor networks.Comment: 6 page

Security Issues in Manet and Counter-Measures

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) are self-configuring networks of mobile nodes connected by wireless links. These nodes are able to move randomly and organize themselves and thus, the network's wireless architecture change rapidly and unpredictably. MANETs are usually utilized in situations of emergency for temporary operations or when there are no resources to set up elaborate networks. Mobile Ad-hoc Networks operate in the absence of any fixed infrastructure, which makes them easy to deploy, at the same time however, due to the absence of any fixed infrastructure, it becomes difficult to make use of the existing routing techniques for network services, and this poses a number of challenges in ensuring the security of the communication network, something that is not easily done as many of the demands of network security conflict with the demands of mobile networks due to the nature of the mobile devices (e.g. low power consumption, low processing load). Most of the ad-hoc routing protocols that address security issues rely on implicit trust relationships to route packets among participating nodes. Apart from security objectives like authentication, availability, confidentiality, and integrity, the ad-hoc routing protocols should also address location confidentiality, cooperation fairness and absence of traffic diversion. In this paper we attempt to survey security issues faced by the mobile ad-hoc network environment and provide a classification of the various security mechanisms. We also analyzed the respective strengths and vulnerabilities of the existing routing protocols and proposed a broad and comprehensive frame-work that can provide a tangible solution

Securing routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is more prone to security threats than other wired and wireless networks because of the distributed nature of the network. Conventional MANET routing protocols assume that all nodes cooperate without maliciously disrupting the operation of the protocol and do not provide defence against attackers. Blackhole and flooding attacks have a dramatic negative impact while grayhole and selfish attacks have a little negative impact on the performance of MANET routing protocols. Malicious nodes or misbehaviour actions detection in the network is an important task to maintain the proper routing protocol operation. Current solutions cannot guarantee the true classification of nodes because the cooperative nature of the MANETs which leads to false exclusions of innocent nodes and/or good classification of malicious nodes. The thesis introduces a new concept of Self- Protocol Trustiness (SPT) to discover malicious nodes with a very high trustiness ratio of a node classification. Designing and implementing new mechanisms that can resist flooding and blackhole attacks which have high negative impacts on the performance of these reactive protocols is the main objective of the thesis. The design of these mechanisms is based on SPT concept to ensure the high trustiness ratio of node classification. In addition, they neither incorporate the use of cryptographic algorithms nor depend on routing packet formats which make these solutions robust and reliable, and simplify their implementations in different MANET reactive protocols. Anti-Flooding (AF) mechanism is designed to resist flooding attacks which relies on locally applied timers and thresholds to classify nodes as malicious. Although AF mechanism succeeded in discovering malicious nodes within a small time, it has a number of thresholds that enable attacker to subvert the algorithm and cannot guarantee that the excluded nodes are genuine malicious nodes which was the motivation to develop this algorithm. On the other hand, Flooding Attack Resisting Mechanism (FARM) is designed to close the security gaps and overcome the drawbacks of AF mechanism. It succeeded in detecting and excluding more than 80% of flooding nodes within the simulation time with a very high trustiness ratio. Anti-Blackhole (AB) mechanism is designed to resist blackhole attacks and relies on a single threshold. The algorithm guarantees 100% exclusion of blackhole nodes and does not exclude any innocent node that may forward a reply packet. Although AB mechanism succeeded in discovering malicious nodes within a small time, the only suggested threshold enables an attacker to subvert the algorithm which was the motivation to develop it. On the other hand, Blackhole Resisting Mechanism (BRM) has the main advantages of AB mechanism while it is designed to close the security gaps and overcome the drawbacks of AB mechanism. It succeeded in detecting and excluding the vast majority of blackhole nodes within the simulation time