An Efficient Approach for Countering Black Hole Attack in MANETs

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks(MANETs) are autonomous and decentralized wireless systems. MANETs consist of mobile hosts that are free in moving in and out in the network. Security in MANET is the most important concern for the basic functionality of network. MANETs often suffer from various security attacks because of its features like open medium, changing its topology dynamically, lack of central monitoring and management, cooperative algorithms and no clear defense mechanism. In this paper, we consider only black hole attak. Black hole attack in MANETS is a serious security problem to be solved. In this attack, a malicious node uses the routing protocol to advertise itself as having the shortest path to the node whose packets it wants to intercept. In flooding based protocol, if the malicious reply packet reaches the requesting node before the reply from the actual node, a forged route has been created. This malicious node then can choose whether to drop the packets to perform a denial-of-service attack(DOS) or to use its place on the route as the first step in a man-in-the-middle attack. This paper provides a solution for countering black hole attack based on data routing information.