Trust Based DSR Routing Protocol for Mitigating Cooperative Black Hole Attacks in Ad Hoc Networks

Identifying a trusted and secure route in an un-trusted environment is always a challenging problem. Lack of centralized infrastructure and dependence on other nodes for routing data, always pose security threats in ad hoc networks. So routing in ad hoc networks demands a secure end-to-end route that is free of malicious nodes for reliable packet forwarding. In this paper, we have designed a routing solution called Trust Based Dynamic Source Routing that enables the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) Protocol to find a secure end-to-end route free of black hole nodes with cooperation from the neighbors. Also our solution can be able to protect the network in the presence of colluding attackers without the need of promiscuous monitoring the neighbor nodes. Extensive simulation has been carried out to evaluate the design of our protocol. The experiment results show that our protocol is able to achieve routing security with 42 % increase in packet delivery ratio and 37 % reduction in packet loss rate when compared to standard DSR under cooperative black hole attack.