Request route flooding attack is one of the main challenges in the security of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) as it is easy to initiate and difficult to prevent. A malicious node can launch an attack simply by sending an excessively high number of route request (RREQ) packets or useless data packets to nonexistent destinations. As a result, the network is rendered useless as all its resources are used up to serve this storm of RREQ packets and hence unable to perform its normal routing duty. Most existing research efforts on detecting such a flooding attack use the number of RREQs originated by a node per unit time as the threshold to classify an attacker. These algorithms work to some extent; however, they suffer high misdetection rate and reduce network performance. This paper proposes a new flooding attacks detection algorithm (FADA) for MANETs based on a machine learning approach. The algorithm relies on the route discovery history information of each node to capture similar characteristics and behaviors of nodes belonging to the same class to decide if a node is malicious. The paper also proposes a new flooding attacks prevention routing protocol (FAPRP) by extending the original AODV protocol and integrating FADA algorithm. The performance of the proposed solution is evaluated in terms of successful attack detection ratio, packet delivery ratio, and routing load both in normal and under RREQ attack scenarios using NS2 simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed FAPRP can detect over 99% of RREQ flooding attacks for all scenarios using route discovery frequency vector of sizes larger than 35 and performs better in terms of packet delivery ratio and routing load compared to existing solutions for RREQ flooding attacks.

JCM is an open access journal on the science and engineering of communication.

Routing services in Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) are the goal of denial of service (DoS) attack forms, such as: Blackhole, Sinkhole, Grayhole, Wormhole, Flooding and Whirlwind. There are some related researches to improve of security performance of routing services, such as H(AODV), OTP_AODV, SAODV and ARAN. They require hypothetical conditions that public key infrastructure (PKI) is available. TAMAN routing protocol supported a digital certificate verification service adaptively and quickly to the dynamic topology of the network without relying on any certification authorities (CA). However, node's digital certificate is installed manually and TAMAN has not digital certificate provision and revocation mechanisms. Hence, it is restricted to operate on MANET where nodes move randomly. In this article, we propose a Digital Certification Management Mechanisms (DCMM) based on X.509 standard which supports storing digital certificate, provision and revocation without any PKI. We have implemented DCMM on TAMAN protocol and simulated with NS2 using static and mobility scenarios with speed 30m/s. Simulation results show that digital certificates providing process completely after 70 seconds for 100 member nodes using static scenario and 270 seconds using mobility scenario, and TAMAN performance using DCMM is reduced slightly in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and routing load.