Cooperative Black Hole Attack Prevention for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The black hole attack is one of the security attacks that occur in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In this article, the routing security issues and the problem of coordinated attack by multiple black holes acting in group in MANET are addressed in detail. Two authentication mechanisms, based on the hash function, the message authentication code (MAC) and the pseudo random function (PRF), are proposed to provide fast message verification and group identification, identify multiple black holes cooperating with each other and to discover the safe routing avoiding cooperative black hole attack.