Impact Analysis of Wormhole and Blackhole attacks over Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we will implement two attacks over mobile ad hoc networks known as Wormhole attack and Blackhole attack. We will also analyze the impact of these attacks on data communication when using a reactive routing protocol for data communication. The reactive routing protocol used is well known Ad-hoc On- demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol. In the Wormhole attack, at least two malicious nodes i.e., attackers disseminates wrong network information to its neighbors during the routing table formation due to which these attacks become the intermediate nodes on the selected route and drop data packets during the communication process. These two attackers form a tunnel through which they can sent the control packets to each other and if one of them are is placed near the destination then they can make sure that they are being selected on the discovered path. Due to the wrong information spread by the malicious nodes the routing tables of its nearby nodes contains untrue information about routes to various or specific destinations. When this wrong information is used for data communication during the communication process the all the data packets will go to wrong nodes and eventually dropped by attacker nodes. This decreases the network throughput and packet delivery ratio while wastes the scarce network bandwidth. On the other hand, in blackhole attack the attacker node comes on the discovered route and drop all the packets received for destination. To implement the proposed attacks, we used a network simulator called Exata simulator. The simulation results are collected for performance analysis of the underlying network. Various metrics such as packet delivery ratio and network throughput are used to show the effect of the proposed attack over a wide range of network scenarios.