Collaborative Defense Techniques Against MANETs Malicious Nodes

Abstract

Blackhole (BH) attacks are among the most significant threats in mobile ad-hoc networks. A BH is a security attack in which a malicious node absorbs data packets and sends fake routing information to neighboring nodes. BH attacks have been widely studied. However, existing defense methods wrongfully assume that BH attacks cannot overcome the most common defense approaches. A new wave of BH attacks is known as smart BH attacks. In this study, we used a highly aggressive type of BH attack that can predict sequence numbers to overcome traditional detection methods that set a threshold to sequence numbers. To protect the network from this type of BH attack, we propose a collaborative defense method that uses local information collected from neighboring nodes. We evaluated the performance of our defense method against a smart BH attack and a collaborative attack that uses the collaboration of another malicious node. Our results show that the proposed method successfully detects and contains these threats to some degree. Consequently, the smart BH attack success rate decreases.