Vulnerability assessment of AODV and SAODV routing protocols against network routing attacks and performance comparisons

Secure routing is an important issue in MANETs. Routing protocols can have vulnerabilities that may be exploited by malicious nodes to disrupt the normal routing behavior. In fact, vulnerabilities may even exist in secure versions of the routing protocols, which makes secure routing a real challenge to achieve. In this paper, we present vulnerability analysis of AODV and Secure AODV (SAODV) routing protocols against routing attacks. SAODV is a secure version of the basic AODV protocol that uses asymmetric key cryptography. We simulate a number of routing attacks to show that SAODV can counter most attacks that are successful against AODV. However, SAODV has vulnerabilities of its own that allow replay attacks to succeed. We, therefore, propose a new security scheme, Robust SAODV (R-SAODV), which incorporates temporal time stamping of SAODV extensions. Temporal time stamping addresses the issue of replay attacks by ensuring the freshness of the exchanged control messages. Our simulation results in ns-2 indicate that our proposed security scheme, R-SAODV, is able to achieve similar performance as SAODV. This implies that we have achieved added security with less additional cost to the system.