On vulnerability and protection of ad hoc on-demand distance vector protocol

Vulnerabilities and the attacks on Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol are investigated and studied via analysis and simulation. The attacks are classified by their target properties. The analysis shows that the on-demand route query enables the malicious host to conduct real time attacks on AODV. False distance vector and false destination sequence attacks are studied by simulation. Two connection scenarios: common destination and uniformly distributed traffic load are considered. The delivery ratio, attack overhead, and the propagation of false routes are measured by varying the number of connections and the mobility of the hosts. The simulation results illustrate that the attacker can confuse the network connectivity with false routes and lead to a decrease up to 75% in the delivery ratio. When the hosts are uniformly distributed, the false distance vector attacks can not cheat more than half of the hosts. But the false destination sequence routes can propagate to most of the network. The anomaly patterns of sequence numbers carried by routing request (RREQ) can be applied to detect the false destination sequence attacks. The vulnerability analysis results and anomaly patterns can be employed by other Ad Hoc routing protocols to establish intrusion prevention and detection mechanisms.