Detecting blackhole attacks on DSR-based mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes that communicate with each other without any fixed infrastructure or a central network authority. From a security design perspective, MANETs have no clear line of defense; i.e. no built-in security. Thus, the wireless channel is accessible to both legitimate network users and malicious attackers. A blackhole attack is a severe attack that can be easily employed against data routing in MANETs. A blackhole is a malicious node that can falsely reply for any route requests without having an active route to a specified destination and drops all the receiving data packets. In this paper, a novel scheme for Detecting Blackhole Attacks in MANETs (so-called DBA-DSR) is introduced. The BDA-DSR protocol detects and avoids the blackhole problem before the actual routing mechanism is started by using fake RREQ packets to catch the malicious nodes. Simulation results are provided, showing that the proposed DBA-DSR scheme outperforms DSR in terms of packet delivery ratio and network throughput, chosen as performance metrics, when blackhole nodes are present in the network.