A Bullet-Proof Verification Approach to Defend against Black Hole Attacks in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks, a malicious node can respond with a faked route reply (RREP) message to a source that explores a route in order to make the source establish a false route leading to the malicious node. Then, the malicious node can absorb all transmitted packets like a black hole. This paper proposes a totally secure defense against the black hole attack with low control overhead and high reliability. The proposed approach, named a bullet-proof verification (BPV) method, consists of a detection phase, in which a node detects a suspicious node by analyzing the data routing information of its neighbors and a verification phase, in which a node initiates the verification of a suspicious node conditionally only if it receives RREP from the suspicious node. The crux of this approach lies in using an encrypted verification message that goes straight to the destination through the path that may include some malicious nodes and also in using both destination sequence number and hop distance for verification. In addition, a distributed watchdog mechanism is employed to track down any malicious nodes. Simulation results show that the BPV approach reduces control overhead significantly and defends against black hole attack reliably.