A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a spontaneous network that can be established with no fixed infrastructure. Security has become a primary concern in order to provide protected communication between nodes in a potentially hostile environment. Denial of Service (DoS) attacks has also become a major problem in MANET. A DoS attack is a large-scale attempt by malicious users to flood the victim network with an enormous number of packets. This exhausts the victim network of resources such as bandwidth, computing power, etc. The victim is unable to provide services to its legitimate clients and network performance is greatly deteriorated. In Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET), various types of Denial of Service Attacks (DoS) are possible because of the inherent limitations of its routing protocols. Considering the Ad hoc On Demand Vector (AODV) routing protocol as the base protocol it is possible to find a suitable solution to overcome the malicious flooding i.e. attack of initiating/forwarding Route Requests (RREQs) that lead to hogging of network resources and packet dropping is a technique in which a node drops data packets (conditionally or randomly) that it is supposed to forward hence denial of service to genuine nodes. In this dissertation, a proactive scheme is proposed that can prevent a specific kind of DoS attack and identify the misbehaving node. Since the proposed scheme is distributed in nature it has the capability to prevent DoS well. The performance of the proposed algorithm in a series of simulations reveals that the proposed scheme provides a better solution than existing approaches.
DOS, MANET, AODV
