The Heuristic Steadfastness Approach to Enhance Performance under Cooperative Black Hole Attack in Manet

Abstract

Security in mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is the most essential concern for the fundamental functionality of network. MANETs often suffer from diverse security attacks because of its features like open medium, changing its topology dynamically, lack of central monitoring and management, cooperative algorithms and no clear defence mechanism. Though ad-hoc on demand Distance Vector (AODV) is one of the principal routing protocols yet it is exposed to the Black hole attacks, where a malicious node falsely advertises good paths to a destination node during the route discovery process. Such malicious nodes affect the network performance severely by dropping all the data packets instead of forwarding it to intended receiver. This attack becomes more severe when a group of malicious nodes work together with each other which results in "Co-Operative Black hole Attack" i.e. the nodes collude to each other hence, making this attack more challenging to identify. In this paper, we have enhanced AODV protocol with Heuristic Steadfastness Technique which will help to detect and eliminate cooperative blackhole attack from the network on the basis of intelligent route discovery.