An Analysis and Prevention of Routing Attacks in Mobile Adhoc Networks

In Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs), routing attacks are considered as a serious issue. However, in the presence of malicious nodes, the networks are affected by various kinds of attacks. The malicious node(s) can attack a MANET in different ways, such as sending fake messages several times; fake routing information and advertising fake links to disrupt routing operations. Black hole attacks are significant attacks that need to be addressed in MANETs. Although, significant research has been done to combat black hole attacks, this work successfully attempted to detect and prevent the black hole attacks. The proposed work utilizes sequence number associated with every route to identify and prevent black hole attacks. This work is implemented in NS2 simulator. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm improves the performance of the network after identifying malicious nodes. Keywords—Mobile adhoc networks, black hole attacks, routing protocols, malicious node