Cross layer detection for black hole attack in wireless network

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are especially vulnerable to attacks for lacking infrastructure and data transfer using wireless communication, especial for denial of service (DoS) attacks. Black hole and gray hole attack are two kinds of denial of service (DoS) attacks and can bring great damage to mobile ad hoc network. This paper demonstrates an adaptive approach to detecting black and gray hole attacks in MANET based on a cross layer design. In network layer, we proposed a path-based method to overhear the next hop’s action. In MAC layer, a collision rate reporting system is established to estimate dynamic detecting threshold so as to lower the false positive rate under high network overload. This scheme does not send out extra control packets and saves the system resources of the detecting node. We choose DSR protocol to test the algorithm by ns-2 as simulation tool. The experiment result verifies our theory: the average detection rate is above 90% and the false positive rate is below 10%. Moreover, the adaptive threshold strategy contributes to decrease the false positive rate.