An Adaptive Approach to Detecting Black and Gray Hole Attacks in Ad Hoc Network

Black and gray hole attack is one kind of routing disturbing attacks and can bring great damage to the network. As a result, an efficient algorithm to detect black and gray attack is important. This paper demonstrates an adaptive approach to detecting black and gray hole attacks in ad hoc network based on a cross layer design. In network layer, we proposed a path-based method to overhear the next hop's action. This scheme does not send out extra control packets and saves the system resources of the detecting node. In MAC layer, a collision rate reporting system is established to estimate dynamic detecting threshold so as to lower the false positive rate under high network overload. We choose DSR protocol to test our algorithm and ns-2 as our simulation tool. Our experiment result verifies our theory: the average detection rate is above 90% and the false positive rate is below 10%. Moreover, the adaptive threshold strategy contributes to decreasing the false positive rate.