Protecting MANETs from Black and Gray Hole Attacks Through a Detailed Detection System

Abstract

In mobile ad-hoc network (MANET), identification and mitigation of black and gray-hole attacks is a challenging task compared to the detection of other attacks. To solve this issue, a secure route discovery ad-hoc ondemand distance vector (SRD-AODV) protocol has been suggested, which verifies the nodes only during the path discovery. But, it is necessary to authenticate the nodes during data transmission since the gray-hole nodes broadcast an accurate target sequence number (TSN) during the route discovery, whereas it becomes malicious and drops the packets during the data forwarding. Hence in this article, a secure route maintenance and attack detection AODV (SRMAD-AODV) protocol is proposed for identifying and defending the black and gray-hole attacks in the data transfer stage. Initially, an attack discovery system (ADS) node is decided from the connected dominating set (CDS) method based on energy and confidence score. The CDS is a robust, distinct and localized method to identify nearby linked dominating sets of nodes in a limited range in MANETs. The selected ADS nodes forward a status packet within the size of the dominating set to retrieve the entire behavioral data. ADS nodes examine gathered behavioral data and create a blacklist in which the suspected black and gray-hole nodes are added. Then, the blacklist is forwarded to the origin node to confirm the susceptibility of nodes present in the blacklist. Once the origin node authenticates the blacklist, it broadcasts a block message to all other nodes in a path for discarding blacklist nodes from the routing path. Further, this SRMAD-AODV protocol is simulated and the findings exhibit that it realizes 5.2sec of end-to-end delay (EED) and 86 % of packet delivery ratio (PDR) in contrast to the SRD-AODV protocol