Prevention of Black Hole Attack in Multicast Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks Using a Self-Organized Public Key Infrastructure

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is an autonomous system of mobile nodes connected by wireless links in which nodes cooperate by forwarding packets for each other thereby enabling communication beyond direct wireless transmission range. Example applications include battlefield communication, disaster recovery operations, and mobile conferencing. The dynamic nature of ad-hoc networks makes them more vulnerable to security attacks compared with fixed networks. Providing security in mobile ad-hoc networks has been a major issue in recent years. Most of the secure routing protocols proposed by researchers need a centralized authority or a trusted third party to provide authentication. This destroys the self-organizing nature of ad-hoc networks. Black Hole attack is one of the routing attacks that occur in MANETs. In this attack, a malicious node uses the routing protocol to advertise itself as having the shortest path to the node whose packets it wants to intercept. In this article, we propose an enhanced certificate based authentication mechanism, where nodes authenticate each other by issuing certificates to neighboring nodes and generating public key without the need of any online centralized authority. The proposed scheme uses Multicast Ad-hoc On Demand Distance Vector Routing (MAODV) protocol as a support for certification. The effectiveness of our mechanism is illustrated by simulations conducted using network simulator ns-2.