FAPRP: A Machine Learning Approach to Flooding Attacks Prevention Routing Protocol in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Request route flooding attack is one of the main challenges in the security of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) as it is easy to initiate and difficult to prevent. A malicious node can launch an attack simply by sending an excessively high number of route request (RREQ) packets or useless data packets to nonexistent destinations. As a result, the network is rendered useless as all its resources are used up to serve this storm of RREQ packets and hence unable to perform its normal routing duty. Most existing research efforts on detecting such a flooding attack use the number of RREQs originated by a node per unit time as the threshold to classify an attacker. These algorithms work to some extent; however, they suffer high misdetection rate and reduce network performance. This paper proposes a new flooding attacks detection algorithm (FADA) for MANETs based on a machine learning approach. The algorithm relies on the route discovery history information of each node to capture similar characteristics and behaviors of nodes belonging to the same class to decide if a node is malicious. The paper also proposes a new flooding attacks prevention routing protocol (FAPRP) by extending the original AODV protocol and integrating FADA algorithm. The performance of the proposed solution is evaluated in terms of successful attack detection ratio, packet delivery ratio, and routing load both in normal and under RREQ attack scenarios using NS2 simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed FAPRP can detect over 99% of RREQ flooding attacks for all scenarios using route discovery frequency vector of sizes larger than 35 and performs better in terms of packet delivery ratio and routing load compared to existing solutions for RREQ flooding attacks