Analysis of Black Hole Attack on MANETs Using Different MANET Routing Protocols

Abstract: Wireless networks are gaining popularity to its peak today, as the users want wireless connectivity irrespective of their geographic position. There is an increasing threat of attacks on the Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET). Black hole attack is one of the security threat in which the traffic is redirected to such a node that actually does not exist in the network. It’s an analogy to the black hole in the universe in which things disappear. The node presents itself in such a way to the node that it can attack other nodes and networks knowing that it has the shortest path. MANETs must have a secure way for transmission and communication which is quite challenging and vital issue. In order to provide secure communication and transmission, researcher worked specifically on the security issues in MANETs, and many secure routing protocols and security measures within the networks were proposed. Previously the works done on security issues in MANET were based on reactive routing protocol like Ad-Hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV). Different kinds of attacks were studied, and their effects were elaborated by stating how these attacks disrupt the performance of MANET. The scope of this thesis is to study the effects of Black hole attack in MANET using both Proactive routing protocol i.e. Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) and Reactive routing protocol Ad-Hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV). Comparative analysis of Black Hole attack for both protocols is taken into account. The impact of Black Hole attack on the performance of MANET is evaluated finding out which protocol is more vulnerable to the attack and how much is the impact of the attack on both protocols. The measurements were taken in the light of throughput, end-to-end delay and network load. Simulation is done in Optimized Network Engineering Tool (OPNET).