New attacks and efficient countermeasures for multicast AODV

Security in multicast routing in MANETs is crucial in order to enable effective and efficient multicast-based applications. Multicast Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (MAODV) protocol is one of the well-known multicast routing protocol in MANET. In this paper, we identify and describe, for the first time, three new protocol-dependant attacks on multicast operations of MAODV namely, Group Leader Selection (GLS); False Link Breakage (FLB) and Group Leader Pruning (GLP) attack. For each attack, we implement a scenario to demonstrate the impact of the attack on the performance of the network. Implemented scenarios show a considerable degradation in the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) of the protocol. Accordingly, we propose security countermeasures for the identified attacks. Simulation results of the secured and unsecured MAODV show that the proposed countermeasures are effective and efficient. In particular, compared to unsecured MAODV, the proposed countermeasures improve the PDR with 85%.