Page 1 of 7
European Journal of Business &
Social Sciences
Available at https://ejbss.org/
ISSN: 2235-767X
Volume 07 Issue 05
May 2019
Available online: https://ejbss.org/ P a g e | 1779
Detection of Black Hole for AODV in MANET
Sonia Tyagi , Rakesh Chawla
1Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Delhi Institute of Technology and Management,
Deenbandhu Chhotu Ram University of Science & Technology (DCRUST), Sonepat
soniyatyagi1896@gmail.com
2Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Delhi Institute of Technology and Management,
Deenbandhu Chhotu Ram University of Science & Technology (DCRUST), Sonepat
rakeshchawla11@yahoo.com
Abstract—The nodes that perform communication while moving from one location to another are called a
Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET). The wireless nodes that can dynamically form a network to exchange
information without using any existing fixed network infrastructure. In a MANET, communication between the
mobile devices is carried out by some intermediate devices called routers. In the routing of MANET, some
intermediate nodes act maliciously & attack the packets that are delivered through them. One such type attack is
black hole attack that absorbs all data packets in the network without moving them to forward. Hence data loss
will occur as data packets are not moved to the destination node. In this paper we provide a secure mechanism to
overcome such types of attacks.
Keywords— MANET, Black hole attack, end to end acknowledge
I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless ad-hoc networks [1] are composed of autonomous nodes that are self- managed without any
infrastructure. Therefore nodes in ad-hoc networks can enter and leave the network dynamically. This network
is generally established in an area where a fixed infrastructure is impossible. The nodes communicate with each
other by passing the packets of message through each other. The ad-hoc network uses some routing protocol for
proper transfer of packets from source to destination. Some popular protocols are – Dynamic Source Routing
(DSR), Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) & Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector (DSDV).
The Mobile Ad-hoc Networks are used in numerous applications-in military and rescue areas, to establish a new
network after any natural calamity. Besides acting as a host, each node also acts as a router to discover a path
and forward packets to the correct node in the network.
As wireless ad-hoc networks lack an infrastructure, they are exposed to a lot of attacks. One of these attacks is
the Black Hole attack [2][3]. In the Black Hole attack, a malicious node absorbs all data packets in itself, similar
to a hole which sucks in everything in. In this way, all packets in the network are dropped.
A malicious node dropping all the traffic in the network makes use of the vulnerabilities of the route discovery
packets of the on demand protocols, such as AODV. In route discovery process of AODV protocol, intermediate
nodes are responsible to find a fresh path to the destination, sending discovery packets to the neighbor nodes.
Malicious nodes do not use this process and instead, they immediately respond to the source node with false
information as though it has fresh enough path to the destination. Therefore source node sends its data packets
via the malicious node to the destination assuming it is a true path.
Black Hole attack may occur due to a malicious node which is deliberately misbehaving, as well as a damaged
node interface. In any case, nodes in the network will constantly try to find a route for the destination, which
makes the node consume its battery in addition to losing packets. Our mechanism helps to protect the network
by detecting and reacting to malicious activities of any node.
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European Journal of Business &
Social Sciences
Available at https://ejbss.org/
ISSN: 2235-767X
Volume 07 Issue 05
May 2019
Available online: https://ejbss.org/ P a g e | 1780
II. ROUTING IN MANETS
MANETs have special limitation and properties such as limited bandwidth and power, highly dynamic
topology, high error rates etc. [2][4]. Moreover, compared to infrastructure based networks, in a MANET, all
nodes are mobile and can be connected dynamically in an arbitrary manner. Nodes of MANET behave as router
and take part in discovery and maintenance to establish a reliable route of each other. Therefore, routing
protocols for wired networks cannot be directly used in wireless networks and numerous protocols have been
developed for MANETs. These routing protocols are divided into two categories based on management of
routing tables.
These categories are Table Driven Routing Protocols and On-Demand Routing Protocols, shown in the Table 1
below.
Table 1: MANET Routing Protocols
Table Driven Routing
Protocols
On-Demand Routing
Protocols
Destination-Sequenced
Distance Vector Routing
Protocol (DSDV)
Ad-Hoc On-Demand
Distance Vector
Routing (AODV)
Wireless Routing Protocol
(WRP)
Cluster based Routing
Protocols (CBRP)
Global State Routing
(GSR)
Dynamic Source
Routing Protocol
(DSRP)
Hierarchical State Routing
(HSR)
Associativity Based
Routing (ABR)
Zone-based Hierarchical
Link State Routing
Protocol
(ZHLS)
Signal Stability
Routing (SSR)
Fisheye State Routing
(FSR)
Temporally Ordered
Routing Algorithm
(TORA)
Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) [8] Routing Protocol is used for finding a path to the destination
in an ad-hoc network. To find the path to the destination all mobile nodes work in cooperation using the routing
control messages. Thanks to these control messages, AODV Routing Protocol offers quick adaptation to
dynamic network conditions, low processing and memory overhead, low network bandwidth utilization with
small size control messages. The most distinguishing feature of AODV compared to the other routing protocols
is that it uses a destination sequence number for each route entry. The destination sequence number is generated
by the destination when a connection is requested from it. Using the destination sequence number ensures loop
freedom. AODV makes sure the route to the destination does not contain a loop and is the shortest path.
Route Requests (RREQs), Route Replay (RREPs), Route Errors (RERRs) are control messages used for
establishing a path to the destination, sent using UDP/IP protocols. Header information of these control
messages are explained in [9]. When the source node wants to make a connection with the destination node, it
Page 3 of 7
European Journal of Business &
Social Sciences
Available at https://ejbss.org/
ISSN: 2235-767X
Volume 07 Issue 05
May 2019
Available online: https://ejbss.org/ P a g e | 1781
broadcasts an RREQ message. This RREQ message is propagated from the source, received by neighbors
(intermediate nodes) of the source node. The intermediate nodes broadcast the RREQ message to their
neighbors. This process goes on until the packet is received by destination node or an intermediate node that has
a fresh enough route entry for the destination. While the RREQ packet travels through the network, every
intermediate node increases the hop count by one.
If an RREQ message with the same RREQ ID is received, the node silently discards the newly received RREQs,
controlling the ID field of the RREQ message. When the destination node or intermediate node that has fresh
enough route to the destination receive the RREQ message they create an RREP message and update their
routing tables with accumulated hop count and the sequence number of the destination node. Afterwards the
RREP message is unicasted to the source node. While the RREQ and the RREP messages are forwarded by
intermediate nodes, intermediate nodes update their routing tables and save this route entry for 3 seconds, which
is the ACTIVE_ROUTE_TIMEOUT constant value of AODV protocol.
III. SECURITY ATTACKS IN MANET
Security attack is any action that compromises the security of information in an unauthorized way. The attack
may alter, release, or deny data. The attacks on the MANETs can be broadly classified into two categories:
passive and active attacks. Both passive and active attacks can be made on any layer of the network protocol
stack [2][7].
1. Passive Attacks: A passive attack attempts to retrieve valuable information by listening to traffic channel
without proper authorization, but does not affect system resources and the normal functioning of the
network. Passive attacks are very hard to detect because they do not involve any alteration of the data.
2. Active Attacks: An active attack attempts to change or destroy the system resources. It gains an
authentication and tries to affect or disrupt the normal functioning of the network services by injecting or
modifying arbitrary packets of the data being exchanged in the network. An active attack involves
information interruption, modification, or fabrication.
A. Gray Hole Attack (Routing Misbehavior)
Gray hole attacks is an active attack type, which lead to dropping of messages. Attacking node first agrees to
forward packets and then fails to do so. Initially the node behaves correctly and replays true RREP messages to
nodes that initiate RREQ message. This way, it takes over the sending packets. Afterwards, the node just drops
the packets to launch a (DoS) denial of service attack. If neighboring nodes that try to send packets over
attacking nodes lose the connection to destination then they may want to discover a route again, broadcasting
RREQ messages. Attacking node establishes a route, sending RREP messages. This process goes on until
malicious node succeeds its aim (e.g. network resource consumption, battery consumption). This attack is
known as routing misbehavior. [5]
Dropping packets is also one of the behaviors of failed or overloading nodes [8]. One should not evaluate every
dropping packet action as a selective existence, gray or black hole attack. Actually most routing protocols have
no mechanism to detect whether data packets have been forwarded, DSR being the only exception. [10]
B. Black Hole Attack
The difference of Black Hole Attacks [10] compared to Gray Hole Attacks is that malicious nodes never send
true control messages initially. To carry out a black hole attack, malicious node waits for neighboring nodes to
send RREQ messages. When the malicious node receives an RREQ message, without checking its routing table,
immediately sends a false RREP message giving a route to destination over itself, assigning a high sequence
number to settle in the routing table of the victim node, before other nodes send a true one. Therefore requesting
