I-SAODV: Improving SAODV to mitigate hop-count attack in mobile adhoc network

Abstract

A mobile adhoc network (MANET) is a collection of wireless nodes, communicating among themselves over possibly multi hop paths, without the help of any central infrastructure such as base stations. Ad hoc On Demand Vector Routing (AODV) is perhaps the most well known routing protocol for MANET. A variety of attacks can be launched against AODV [1] protocol. One of major attack is modification of hop count in route request and route reply control messages. This attack propagates distorted view of hop counts between two legitimate nodes in the network Secure AODV (SAODV) is a secure extension of the AODV routing protocol. SAODV [2] only prevents from decrease of the hop count attack, while attackers can still forward routing messages with the same hop count or increase in hop count on the network. In this paper, we have proposed a security scheme to improve SAODV (I-SAODV) which uses hash chain and markle hash tree for authentication to protect not only from same hop count fraud but also prevent from maliciously increase in hop count in the message. The effectiveness of I-SAODV is analyzed using network simulator NS2. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.