A neighborhood connectivity-based trust scheme to identify active black hole attacks

Active black hole attack is one of the most severe security threats that can be easily employed against normal routing in mobile ad hoc networks. In order to intrude into routing path, attacker always deceiving others that it has the shortest path to the destination. Once the attacker successfully intrudes into routing path, it can disrupt all data transmission. Most of the existing defense schemes are not effective for the internal attackers that know how the scheme works. In this paper, we propose a neighborhood connectivity based trust scheme that can detect the presence of the attackers during route discovery and quarantine them. The most attractive features of our scheme are 1) Its ability to against two forms of active black hole (active forward and active drop) attacks without relying on any extra hardware or computational intensive cryptographic mechanism. 2) Even the internal attackers that know the scheme or imitating others' identities cannot benefit them to launch the attacks. 3) Colluded active black hole attackers can also be identified.