Secure Measures for the Vulnerabilities in MAODV

Mobile Adhoc NETworks (MANETs) is a highly challenged network environment due to its special characteristics such as decentralization, dynamic topology and neighbor based routing. Most important application for ad-hoc networks is group oriented in nature and can therefore benefit from a multicast communication services. Most of the multicast routing protocols assume trusted, non-adversarial environment and do not take security issues into the account. The security issue of MANETs in group communication is more challenging because of multiple senders and multiple receivers. MANET is vulnerable to several types of security attack [2] and the focus of earlier research is only on unicast applications [3]. In this paper, we analyzed the security of MAODV (Multicast Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector protocol), a well-known multicast routing protocol and identified some routing attacks like black hole, wormhole and flooding. MAODV is a multicast routing protocol for ad-hoc networks that dynamically constructs a shared multicast tree which connects the group members, possibly through some non-member nodes which may or may not be on the tree in order to multicast data to all group members. We proposed a trust based approach in which each node maintains a log of success and failure rate of packet transmissions which are then used to determine the trust values there by helping in the mitigation black hole and worm hole attacks.