Mitigating Malicious Attacks Using Trust Based Secure-BEFORE Routing Strategy in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc Networks (MANET), being infrastructureless and dynamic in nature, are predominantly susceptible to attacks such as black hole, worm hole, cunning gray hole attack at source or destination. Various solutions have been put forth so far in literature in order to mitigate the effects of these attacks on the network performance and to improve the reliability of the network. However, these attacks are still prominently a serious threat in MANET. Hence, a trust based routing strategy termed Secure-BEFORE routing (BEst FOrwarding Route Estimation) is proposed to ensure optimal route estimation in computing the trust value and hop counts using the dummy packets inside the network at 1-hop level. It is observed that the overall performance of the network is improved in providing one-hop level security by maintaining the packet equivalence ratio. Malicious and suspicious nodes are isolated and eliminated from the network, based on their behavior.