A Blackhole Attack Mitigation Algorithm in MANET based on Standard Deviation Outlier Detection

Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) performs a routing and data forwarding obligations in a trustless environment where mobile nodes are not controlled and administered by third parties, it usually suffers from multiple attacks such as the blackhole attacks. This blackhole attacks cause two extreme effects on the network if the malicious nodes are not eliminated. Firstly, it deliberately alters the original data route sequence with an injection of false routing information comprises of the counterfeit destination sequence number and smallest hop count. Secondly, it becomes too greedy to send data to other nodes after receiving from a genuine node. Therefore, this may delay the data transmission process in the act of data dropping. To protect the routing discovery process of an ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) protocol from the blackhole attack, we present a mitigation algorithm based on standard deviation outlier detection to determine a threshold value for validating the route reply (RREP) destination sequence number before route establishment. The simulation shows that the algorithm can detect the malicious nodes and performs better than AODV in a blackhole attack environment.