A novel blackhole attack for multipath AODV and its mitigation

In wireless network, nodes are not connected by physical links. Routing is an important factor in wireless network. Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) is one of the most widely used routing protocol in wireless sensor networks. AODV is a stateless protocol that establishes and maintains a single route between source and destination. If the path is disrupted, then another alternate path is determined. An alternative of AODV, called multipath AODV, has been proposed that establishes multiple routes between source and destination nodes in a single route discovery. So, multipath AODV can use alternative paths in case of failure without going for another route discovery phase. So multipath AODV gives better performance compared to single path AODV. The traditional AODV protocol is vulnerable to the well-known black hole attack. In case of multipath AODV, when one path is affected by blackhole attack, then source node can choose another alternative path. In this paper we propose a new type blackhole attack mainly targeting multipath AODV. To the best of our knowledge there is no blackhole attack which specifically targets multipath AODV. Broadly speaking, in the proposed blackhole attack, the attacker looks for nodes through which many alternative paths of multipath AODV passes through. Such nodes are selected and blackhole attack is launched targeting them, thereby damaging more number of paths in a single attempt. Further, the attacker selects only those genuine nodes through more than a threshold number of alternative paths pass through, thereby facilitating the attacker to use less number of nodes. So the attack scheme is power aware. Finally we also propose an IDS to detect the proposed energy aware blackhole attack. NS2 experimental results show the validity of the proposed attack.