A Mechanism for Detection of Gray Hole Attack in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a non-cryptographic security mechanism to detect and mitigate gray hole attacks in MANETs, specifically targeting the AODV routing protocol, by identifying malicious nodes based on their behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a novel detection scheme that does not rely on cryptography, enhancing security against gray hole attacks in mobile ad hoc networks.

Findings

High detection rate of gray hole nodes

Moderate network traffic overhead

Effective in defending against cooperative gray hole attacks

Abstract

Protecting the network layer from malicious attacks is an important and challenging security issue in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In this paper, a security mechanism is proposed to defend against a cooperative gray hole attack on the well known AODV routing protocol in MANETs. A gray hole is a node that selectively drops and forwards data packets after it advertises itself as having the shortest path to the destination node in response to a route request message from a source node. The proposed mechanism does not apply any cryptographic primitives on the routing messages. Instead, it protects the network by detecting and reacting to malicious activities of any node. Simulation results show that the scheme has a significantly high detection rate with moderate network traffic overhead.