Countermeasures against Multicast attacks on Enhanced-On Demand Multicast Routing Protocol in MANETs

Abstract

Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork which shows promising applications have now gained significant importance in research as well as in practice, due to their autonomous and self-maintaining nature. Unlike other types of networks, MANETs are usually deployed without a centralized control unit. Hence, mutual cooperation amongst the participating entities forms the basis for determining the routes to the destination. This aspect along with the fact that MANET nodes are often constrained in power, storage and computational resources, make MANETs vulnerable to various communications security related attacks. Therefore, the direct application of the conventional routing algorithms is infeasible here. Numerous attempts can be found in the literature that concentrates on improving the security of the routing protocols for MANETs. However, according to our analysis, none of the routing protocols are complete by itself. Therefore, in this paper we focus on improving the Secure Enhanced-On Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (EODMRP) to safeguard it against flooding and blackhole attacks. The proposed solutions are implemented and tested using GloMoSim (2.03). The performance analysis carried out shows improvement in packet delivery ratio in presence of blackhole attack, with marginal rise in average end-to-end delay and normalized routing overhead. The proposed mechanism for flooding attack works even when the identity of the malicious nodes is unknown and does not use any additional network bandwidth. It is simple to implement and maintains or improves network throughput when there are no malicious nodes but the network is congested with excess traffic.