Preventing Cooperative Black Hole Attacks in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Simulation Implementation and Evaluation

A black hole attack is a severe attack that can be easily employed against routing in mobile ad hoc networks. A black hole is a malicious node that falsely replies for any route requests without having active route to specified destination and drops all the receiving packets. If these malicious nodes work together as a group then the damage will be very serious. This type of attack is called cooperative black hole attack. In S. Ramaswamy et al. (2003), we proposed a solution to identifying and preventing the cooperative black hole attack. Our solution discovers the secure route between source and destination by identifying and isolating cooperative black hole nodes. In this paper, via simulation, we evaluate the proposed solution and compare it with other existing solutions in terms of throughput, packet loss percentage, average end-to-end delay and route request overhead. The experiments show that (1) the AODV greatly suffers from cooperative black holes in terms of throughput and packet losses, and (2) our solution proposed in S. Ramaswamy et al. (2003) presents good performance in terms of better throughput rate and minimum packet loss percentage over other solutions, and (3) our solution can accurately prevent the cooperative black hole attacks. The example findings are: (1) the proposed scheme presents 5 - 8% more communication overhead of route request; and (2) The secure route discovery delay slightly increases the packet loss percentage.