Comparison of two security protocols for preventing packet dropping and message tampering attacks on AODV-based mobile ad Hoc networks

In Emergency MANETs (eMANETs), the broadcasting nature of the wireless medium, the lack of pre-established trust relationship among nodes, and the frequent topology changes, cause some serious security challenges, making the network vulnerable to malicious attacks such as wormhole attacks. This paper investigates a recently proposed Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-based routing algorithm (so-called AODV-Wormhole Attack Detection Reaction - here referred to as AODV-WADR-AES) for securing AODV-based eMANETs against wormhole attacks. The proposal consists of substituting the AES part of the scheme by the Triple Data Encryption Standard (TDES), yielding the AODV-WADR-TDES routing algorithm, with the goal to study the performance of the algorithm where mobile devices that are incompatible with AES are part of eMANET nodes. In doing so, markers in the form of hash codes are included in the data packets to help consolidating the data integrity. Simulation results are presented to validate the proposed AODV-WADR-TDEA scheme. It is also shown that the AODV-WADR-AES scheme outperforms the AODV-WADR-TDES scheme in terms of end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, and number of packets traversing through the wormhole link.