A Light Weight Trust Based Authentication Mechanism to Thwart Black Hole Attack in Manet

Providing secure routing in MANET environment is a difficult task due to its distinct nature. In MANET, routing protocols are designed to cope with the network operations but in nature they are affecting by both internal and external attacks. Black hole attack is one kind of internal attack that affects routing operation by retaining all incoming packets. This type of attack is very hard to predict because it is launched internally by compromised nodes. In addition, ensuring authentication is also a difficult task because each node in the MANET is in situation to communicate with other nodes without previous interactions. This blindness in communication leads networks more vulnerable. To tackle such issues in this paper a light weight authentication mechanism to thwart black hole attack is proposed. In this mechanism each node evaluates the trustworthiness of other nodes based on direct and indirect recommendations. In addition, it is also make use of closeness, energy and honesty as trust evaluation metrics. The simulation results show better performance in terms of detection of black hole attack and QoS metrics.