Investigating severity of blackhole attack and its variance in wireless mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Blackhole attack is a common attack in mobile ad hoc network (MANET). Generation of this attack is simple, which does not require special tools or sophisticated attack techniques. Various solutions to prevent this attack have been proposed. However, none of them has measured the severity of this attack. In fact, the assessment of severity is essential to develop effective and efficient prevention against the attack. The purpose of this study is to investigate the severity of blackhole attack. In this investigation, new security metrics, namely corruption routing table (CRT), compromising relay node (CRN) and compromising originator node (CON), have been proposed and used for the severity evaluation. In addition, a new blackhole attack, namely hybrid blackhole attack (HBHA) with two variants - independent and cooperative HBHAs are also introduced for the purpose of comparative study. Simulations using Java in time simulator/scalable wireless ad hoc network simulator (JiST/SWANS) show that the proposed metrics are effective in assessing the severity of the blackhole attacks. Among these three blackhole attacks, independent HBHA is the most severe attack. Meanwhile, the cooperative HBHA is the most efficient attack.