Improved ALERT protocol in MANET with strategies to prevent DOS & MITM attacks

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) gained lot of importance due to fast growth of the businesses and used in different applications such as military, entertainment, commerce, emergency services etc. Because of openness and decentralization feature of the MANET, nodes of the MANET can be vulnerable to malicious entities. Hence, anonymity becomes one of the important aspects in MANET. In last few years, a lot of research has been carried out by different researcher to prevent the anonymity of the MANET. Different routing protocols have been evolved such as ANODR, GSPR, AO2P, ALARM and ASR to secure the anonymity of the MANET. But all of these protocols have some limitations regarding providing complete anonymity of source, destination and also routes and also involving high cost due to hop by hop encryption and redundant traffic. To overcome above issues ALERT protocol is evolved which is distinguished by its low cost due to randomized routing mechanism and anonymity protection for sources, destinations, and routes. But ALERT protocol does not have any strategy to provide security against the active attacks such as MITM and DoS attack. So in the proposed work we have designed new strategy which uses hashing with SHA-1 algorithm and location based pseudonyms of nodes technique to avoid the attacks. The simulation of the existing and proposed ALERT protocol has been carried out with JAVA using JUNG tools and shown that our proposed solution is able to avoid the attacks on the network. Also it is efficient in terms of energy consumption and packet delivery ratio as compared to existing ALERT protocol.