Secure and reliable data forwarding using homomorphic encryption against blackhole attacks in mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a dynamic wireless network without any infrastructures. It is vulnerable to many types of attacks. Thus, security has turned out to be an important factor to facilitate secured communication between mobile nodes in a wireless environment. Recently, many routing protocols have been established. But most of them do not consider the security criteria in their designing. So, practically any node can maliciously disrupt communication of other nodes. Hence, a new approach is proposed in this paper to provide reliable and secure data transmission in MANETs under possible blackhole attacks based on modified ad-hoc on-demand multipath distance vector (AOMDV) protocol. We divide the message into multiple paths to the destination and use homomorphic encryption scheme for cryptography technique. The performance of the proposed scheme is stable with very high packet delivery ratio while that of AOMDV is found to be vulnerable with the intrusion of malicious nodes in the network. Simulation results show that, compared to the original AOMDV scheme, our proposed scheme improves considerably the packet delivery ratio and network throughput in the presence of malicious nodes.