Impact of Black Hole Attack on AODV Routing Protocol

Abstract — Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes connected by wireless links forming a temporary network without the aid of any infrastructure or any centralized administration. The nodes communicate with each other on the basis of mutual trust. These nodes can act as host/router or both at the same time. They can form arbitrary topologies depending on their connectivity with each other in the network. This characteristic makes MANETs more vulnerable to be exploited by an attacker inside the network. Wireless links also makes the MANETs more susceptible to attacks, which make it easier for the attacker to go inside the network and get access to the ongoing communication. Owing to its mobility and broadcast nature MANETs are particularly vulnerable to attacks over traditional wired networks finally makes them susceptible to various active and passive attacks because of its limited physical security, dynamically changing network topology, energy constrained operations and lack of centralized administration. MANETs often suffer from security attacks because of its features like open medium, lack of central monitoring and management, cooperative algorithms and no clear defense mechanism. In particular, black hole attacks can be easily deployed into the MANETs by the adversary. Our objective is to thoroughly capture and analyze the impact of Black Hole attacks on MANET performance using reactive (AODV) routing protocol with varying number of Blac