Reducing the Severity of Black Hole and DDoS Attacks in MANETs by Modifying AODV Protocol using MAC Authentication and Symmetric Encryption

In Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET), Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol suffers from the black hole attacks that disrupts the functionality of the network by displaying false information during routing process. Such an attack eventually affects the network performance. In this paper, an authentication mechanism based on lightweight encryption algorithm and Media Access Control (MAC) authentication are proposed for black hole and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The proposed technique is validated in Network Simulator 2 (NS2) whose results show that the approach offers prompt route verification with high throughput and generating less routing overhead avoiding black hole attacks.