On the Effect of Black-hole Attack on Opportunistic Routing Protocols
Mahmood Salehi, Amir Darehshoorzadeh, Azzedine Boukerche · 2015
Black-hole is a well-known routing attack through which malicious nodes try to downgrade the communication performance of wireless networks. On the other hand, opportunistic routing protocols aim to increase the reliability of communications compared to traditional routing approaches by utilizing the broadcast nature of wireless medium. Although a tremendous amount of research has been performed in the literature to detect and cancel the effect of black-hole nodes for traditional routing protocols, it is of high importance to study the effects of such a significant security obstacle for opportunistic routing methods as well. In this paper, an analytical model is proposed using Markov chains to model the effect of black-hole attack on opportunistic routing protocols. Furthermore, a novel version of the black-hole attack is proposed and customized for opportunistic routing approaches. Finally, the consequences of this attack on delivering packets to their destination are evaluated, compared, and discussed using both analytical and simulation-based methods. Conducted analyses demonstrate that the proposed attack can have devastating effects on the network's performance.