Intelligent honeypot agent for blackhole attack detection in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networking (WMN), the static mesh routers (MRs) cooperatively relay each other packets to the Internet Gateway (IGW). The routing protocols assume all the nodes in the network to be non-malicious. However, the open architecture of WMNs paves way to malicious attackers who can exploit hidden loopholes in the routing protocol. In this paper, we mainly focus on the vulnerability of the network to a suction attack called blackhole attack. In detecting such attacks, we explore the use of intelligent agents called honeypots which are roaming virtual software agents that generate a dummy route request (RREQ) packets to lure and trap blackhole attackers. We illustrate the performance of our proposed detection approach by extensive simulation results using the ns-2 simulator.