Enhanced dynamic source routing protocol for detection and prevention of sinkhole attack in mobile ad hoc networks

Sinkhole attack is an active routing disruption attack in the routing layer of the mobile ad hoc networks. A sinkhole node attempts to entice all the network traffic towards it by broadcasting bogus routing information to other nodes in the network. On demand routing protocols such as dynamic source routing protocol and ad hoc on demand distance vector protocol are vulnerable to this attack. Sinkhole attack makes use of the route discovery and the route maintenance phases of these protocols. Sinkhole attack often facilitates other attacks such as blackhole attack, greyhole attack, wormhole attack and Sybil attack on MANETs. In this paper, we present a secondary cache based approach to prevent the sinkhole attack in DSR MANETs. The simulation results show that the proposed approach improves the performance of DSR even in the presence of multiple sinkhole attacks.