Intercepting Blackhole Attacks in MANETs: An ASM-based Model

The inherent features of Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs) make them vulnerable to various kinds of security attacks. In particular, in a so-called blackhole attack, one or more malicious hosts can send fake routing information towards an initiator, compromising the reliability of the network in the whole. In this paper, we propose a refinement of the NACK-based Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (N-AODV) protocol, namely Blackhole-free N-AODV (BN-AODV), as a solution to intercept (cooperative) blackhole attacks in MANETs. Thanks to a formalization through an Abstract State Machine-based model, the correctness of the proposed protocol is formally proved.