Mitigating Collaborative Blackhole Attacks on DSR-Based Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

A Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes that rely on co-operation amongst devices that route packets to each other. From a security design perspective, MANETs have no clear line of defense. This lack of security leads the network accessible to both legitimate network users and malicious attackers. A blackhole attack is a severe attack that can be 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 drop all the receiving data packets. The attack may even lead to more devastating damage if two or more blackhole nodes cooperate with each other to launch an attack. This type of attack is known as collaborative blackhole attack. In this paper, a novel scheme Detecting Collaborative Blackhole Attacks (so-called DCBA) for detecting collaborative blackhole attacks in MANETs is introduced. Simulation results are provided, demonstrating the superiority of DCBA compared to Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and the Bait DSR scheme (so-called BDSR) [1] - a recently proposed scheme for detecting and avoiding collaborative blackhole attacks in MANETs - in terms of network throughput rate and minimum packet loss percentage, when collaborative blackhole nodes are present in the network.