A Novel Collaborative Approach for Sinkhole Detection in MANETs

This paper presents a novel approach intended to detect sinkholes in MANETs running AODV. The study focuses on the detection of the well-known sinkhole attack, devoted to attract most of the surrounding network traffic by providing fake routes, and thus, invalidating alternative legitimate routes and disrupting the normal network operation. Our detection approach relies on the existence of “contamination borders”, formed by legitimate nodes under the influence of the sinkhole attack and, at the same time, neighbors of non-contaminated legitimate nodes. Thus, by collecting the routing information of the neighbors, these nodes are likely to be able to properly detect sinkholes. We evaluate our approach in a simulation framework and the experimental results show the promising nature of this approach in terms of detection capabilities.