Identification and Prevention of Joint Gray Hole and Black Hole Attacks

Ad-hoc networks consist of a set of autonomous communicating devices that can communicate with each other by establishing multi-hop radio connections, and these connections are maintained in a localized manner. In these types of networks, especially where the nature of communicating nodes is mobile, e.g., MANETs, maintaining security remains a serious challenge due to their wireless, open, and shared communication medium, reliance on cooperative algorithms, dynamically adaptable topologies, an absence of centralized watching points, etc. Most of the existing protocols, utilized for routing in MANETs are susceptible to diverse varieties of attacks. However, it is also susceptible to the well-known gray and black hole attacks. In these types of attacks, malicious nodes are incorrectly advertised as sensible ways to a destination node throughout the route discovery method. This attack becomes complicated when a bunch of malicious nodes are acting together. In this work, a novel mechanism is introduced to identify the malicious node or nodes that have tried to perform malicious activity. Here, identification is made by their increased data routing information (DRI).