A novel self-checking ad hoc routing scheme against active black hole attacks

Abstract

It is challenging to design a routing scheme that can successfully operate in the presence of adversarial environment in mobile ad hoc network (MANET), where several types of severe routing security threats can be easily employed against normal routing. Among them, active black hole attack is a typical one. Most existing defense schemes postulated that active black hole attackers have no knowledge about the internal prevention mechanisms of MANETs. However, due to the open and self-organized nature of MANET, it is necessary to assume that all nodes, including attackers, know how the security mechanism works. In this paper, we propose a distributed self-checking scheme that can effectively prevent various forms of active black hole attackers. Even the internal attackers who know the security mechanism cannot get any benefit to launch those attacks. Simulation results affirm that our proposed solution is robust and able to improve the packet delivery ratio significantly in an adversarial MANET environment as compared with other routing schemes.