An acknowledgment-based scheme to defend against cooperative black hole attacks in optimized link state routing protocol

In this paper, we address the problem of cooperative black hole attack, one of the major security issues in mobile ad hoc networks. The aim of this attack is to force nodes in the network to choose hostile nodes as relays to disseminate the partial topological information, thereby exploiting the functionality of the routing protocol to retain control packets. In optimized link state routing (OLSR) protocol, if a cooperative black hole attack is launched during the propagation of topology control (TC) packets, the topology information will not be disseminated to the whole network which may lead to routing disruption. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the cooperative black hole attack against OLSR, in which two colluding MPR nodes cooperate in order to disrupt the topology discovery. Then we propose an Acknowledgment based technique that overcomes the shortcomings of the OLSR protocol, and makes it less vulnerable to such attacks by identifying and then isolating malicious nodes in the network. The simulation results of the proposed scheme show high detection rate under various scenarios.