Title: Circumventing sinkhole attack in ad hoc networks

Authors: Khurram Gulzar Rana; Cai Yongquan; Allah Ditta; Muhammad Azeem; Muhammad Qasim

Addresses: College of Computer Science and Technology, Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Technology (BJUT), Beijing 100124, China; Institute of Information Technology, Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, Islamabad 44000, Pakistan ' College of Computer Science and Technology, Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Technology (BJUT), Beijing 100124, China ' College of Computer Science and Technology, Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Technology (BJUT), Beijing 100124, China ' College of Computer Science and Technology, Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Technology (BJUT), Beijing 100124, China ' College of Software Engineering, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China

Abstract: Ad hoc networks are a wireless technology foreseen to be used increasingly in the near future due to their data acquisition and processing abilities. Ad hoc networks are infrastructure-less networks and they suffer from several types of routing attacks. We investigate the problem of defending ad hoc networks against sinkhole attacks that disrupt dynamic routing protocol. We propose a novel method (AODV-SDR) that detects and removes sinkhole attack without using any type of encryption, keying mechanism or hashing function. We work on AODV route discovery phase and malicious node is detected by great change in destination sequence number. We show that our scheme can detect false sink with great accuracy. This approach is very useful because it has no overhead of encryption and hashing.

Keywords: ad hoc networks; network security; sinkhole attacks; AODV route discovery; route request; route reply; network simulation; routing attacks; dynamic routing protocols; malicious nodes; destination sequence number; false sink.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2015.074049

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2015 Vol.9 No.4, pp.363 - 369

Received: 10 Jun 2015
Accepted: 30 Jun 2015

Published online: 03 Jan 2016 *

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