Black hole attack prevention based on authentication mechanism

The black hole attack is one of the security attacks that occur in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs). In the attack, a malicious node exploits the routing protocol to advertise itself as having the shortest path to the node whose data packets it wants to intercept. In this paper, the black hole problem is addressed. An authentication mechanism, based on the hash function, the Message Authentication Code (MAC), and the Pseudo Random Function (PRF), is proposed for black hole prevention on top of Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV). The simulation results show the scheme provides fast message verification identifies black hole and discovers the safe routing avoiding the black hole attack.