MAS-AODV: Mobility Aware Secure AODV to Prevent Gray Hole Attack in MANETs

Security in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is still a crucial issue as the protocols devised till now are still under experimental RFCs and thus no protocol could be standardized to date to stand against the weaknesses of MANETs. In this paper we present Mobility Aware Secure AODV referred to as MAS-AODV, which is an AODV based routing algorithm, to protect MANETs from a selective forwarding attack known as gray hole attack. MAS-AODV uses the speed of movement of nodes for the detection of gray hole nodes and thus termed as mobility aware. If a node moves around in the network with speed greater than the threshold, the node is identified as gray hole node. Apart from this, an added security in the algorithm is through digital signature. All the nodes taking part in the path formation are first verified using digital signature so that no malicious nodes can interfere the transmission of data. Simulation of MAS-AODV shows that the algorithm performs better than AODV in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR) and throughput at a cost of routing overhead and delay in some cases.