Secured Vector Routing Protocol for MANETs in Presence of Malicious Nodes

Abstract

Due to their inherent properties Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are finding their way in diversity of applications. As these are infrastructureless networks, normal traditional routing algorithms are not applicable to MANETs. Many routing algorithms have been proposed for MANETs till now. Vector Routing Protocol (VRP) is proposed for efficient utilization of limited bandwidth in MANETs.
Providing security to the network layer in MANETs is gaining importance nowadays. The two main functions of network layer are ad hoc routing and data forwarding. Due to the inherent properties of MANETs there is huge scope to attack on functions of network layer. Attacks on network layer can be broadly classified in two categories namely routing attacks and packet forwarding attacks. The attacks which try to modify the routing data and mislead the routing protocols are treated as routing attacks. These attacks are specific to the routing protocol used by the MANETs. Packet forwarding attacks on other hand do not disrupt the routing protocol, instead they cause the data packets intentionally inconsistent with routing states. Examples of these attacks are an intermediate node on the path, dropping the data packet, modifying the contents of the packet etc.
In this Thesis we consider only on packet dropping attack on VRP algorithm. We proposed a solution to mitigate the effects of malicious nodes on VRP. Our proposed solution ‘Secured VRP’ secures the VRP algorithm from malicious nodes. Our Secured VRP (SVRP) works far better than VRP in presence of malicious nodes and works exactly as VRP in absence of malicious nodes.