Defending AODV Routing Protocol Against the Black Hole Attack
6
(IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer Science and Informatio n Security, Vol. 08, No.2, 2010 Abstract—In this paper we propose a simple method to detect Black hole attacks in the Ad hoc On Demand Vector (AODV) routing protocol. Even if many previous works focused on authentication and cryptography techniques, nevertheless these techniques suffer from some weaknesses. In fact, this kind of solution is just a first line of defense, which should be completed by an intrusion detection system as a second line. The second line which is proposed here consists ofincluding the source route in the header of the control packets (RREQ). In addition to that, any intermediate node records the sequence number of the destination. Thus, if the packet is compromised, the destination node can easily retrieve the address of the attacker. To secure RREP packets, any intermediate node records the addresses of the nodes to which it forwards RREQ. Thus, any node receiving RREP can check if the sender is legitimate or not. Simulation results show the robustness ofour protocol and that it allows delivering a high ratio ofdata and consumes less route establishment delay.Keywords-component; AODV routing protocol; Black hole attacks; Intrusion detection; Reactive routing protocols; Wireless ad hoc networks. I.INTRODUCTIONWireless networks are inherently susceptible to security problems. The intrusion on the transmission medium is easier than for wired networks and it is possible to conduct denial ofservice attacks by scrambling the used frequency bands. The ad hoc context increases the number of potential security vulnerabilities. Because by definition without infrastructure, ad hoc networks can not benefit from the security services offered by dedicated equipment: firewalls, authentication servers, etc... The security services must be distributed, cooperative and consistent with the available bandwidth. Routing also poses specific problems: each node in the network can serve as a relay and is able to capture or divert traffic in transit. The work presented here is in this context. We address here the problem of securing the AODV routing protocol against the Black Hole attack. During routing in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), ifno control is done on the origin and integrity of the routing message of the network, a malicious node can easily cause disturbances. This will be even easier than wireless ad hoc networks have no physical barrier to protect themselves and all elements can potentially participate in the routing mechanism. If a malicious node has the ability to compromise a valid network node, it can at the discovery process respond to route initiator node with a route reply message by announcing a minimal cost path, to the target node. The transmitter node will then update its routing table with the wrong information. The data packet of the transmitter node will be relayed to the target node by the malicious node that can simply ignore them. This attack is called a “black hole”. The packets are picked up and absorbed by the malicious node. This is an example of attack that may occur in a wireless ad hoc network routing protocol. The first approach of securing the AODV protocol has been made by Zapata with his Secured AODV (SAODV) [1]. In a second publication [2] the protocol is presented in greater detail. SAODV which is based on public key cryptography extends the AODV message format to include security parameter for security the routing messages. Adaptive Secure AODV (A-SAODV) [3] is a prototype implementation of SAODV, based on the AODV-UU implementation by Uppsala University. Unlike AODV-UU, A-SAODV is a multithreaded application: cryptographic operations are performed by a dedicated thread to avoid blocking the processing of other messages. SecAODV [4] is a secure routing protocol, its implementation is similar to that of Boostrapping Security Associations for Routing in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (BSAR) [5] and Secure Bootstrapping and Routing in an IPv6-based ad hoc network (SBRP) [6] for DSR. SecAODV is a distributed algorithm designed for MANETs under IPv6, it did not require a trust relationship established between pairs of nodes, or synchronization between nodes, or shared key or other secure association between nodes. M. Al-Shurman et al. [7] propose two solutions to the BlackHole attack. In the first solution the transmitter is required to authenticate the node that sent the route reply packet (RREP). Defending AODV Routing Protocol Against the Black Hole AttackFatima Ameza, Department of computer sciences, University of Bejaia, 06000 Algeria. Nassima Assam, Department of computer sciences, University of Bejaia, 06000 Algeria. Rachid BeghdadDepartment of computer sciences, University of Bejaia, 06000 Algeria. 112 http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/ ISSN 1947-5500
