Avoiding Black Hole and Cooperative Black Hole Attacks in Wireless Ad hoc Networks

In wireless ad hoc networks, the absence of any control on packets forwarding, make these networks vulnerable by various deny of service attacks (DoS). A node, in wireless ad hoc network, counts always on intermediate nodes to send these packets to a given destination node. An intermediate node, which takes part in packets forwarding, may behave maliciously and drop packets which goes through it, instead of forwarding them to the following node. Such behavior is called black hole attack. In this paper, after having specified the black hole attack, a secure mechanism, which consists in checking the good forwarding of packets by an intermediate node, was proposed. The proposed solution avoids the black hole and the cooperative black hole attacks. Evaluation metrics were considered in simulation to show the effectiveness of the suggested solution. Keywordswireless ad hoc network, routing protocol, security, black hole, cooperative black hole.