Securing ZRP Routing Protocol Against DDoS Attack in Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Abstract

Hybrid routing protocols especially zone routing protocol (ZRP) is getting much attention in recent years due to its superior characteristics over pro-active and reactive routing protocols. Because of its wide applicability in ad hoc networks, the demand for improving its quality of services (QoS) is also increased day by day. In most of the applications the QoS of any system is measured by their availability. It means system availability is the critical parameter of QoS. However, to degrade the QoS of any system attacker performs the denial of service (DoS) attack. Moreover, the DoS attack is strengthened by making it distributed in nature called the Distributed DoS (or DDoS) attack. Securing ZRP routing protocol in ad hoc environment is challenging due to fundamental characteristics of ad hoc networks. In this paper a new model is introduced to make routing protocol secure against DDoS attack in MANET. The proposed model uses intrusion prevention scheme in which some nodes are specified as IPN node to protect the network from DDoS attack. These specified IPS nodes scan the neighbor nodes regularly which comes in its zone and radio range for identifying the misbehavior nodes. On the identification of these misbehavior (i.e., frequent packet passing other than TCP and UDP packets) nodes, these node are blocks by IPN nodes. IPN nodes also send the blocked nodes information to all of the legitimate sender nodes in the network to change their routes. To testify the effectiveness of the proposed model against DDoS attack experiments performed on network simulator tool (NS2.35) on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS platform. Simulation results show that proposed model makes ZRP protocol efficient to handle DDoS attack.