Annals of Emerging Technologies in Computing (AETiC)
Vol. 3, No. 2, 2019
Research Article
Secured Approach towards Reactive
Routing Protocols Using Triple Factor
in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Mohammad Riyaz Belgaum
1, *
, Shahrulniza Musa
1
, MazlihamMohd Su’ud
1
,
Muhammad Alam
1,2
, Safeeullah Soomro
3
and Zainab Alansari
3,4
1
Malaysian Institute of Information Technology, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
mohammad.ri[email protected].edu.my, (shahrulniza‖mazliham‖mansoor)@unikl.edu.my
2
Ilma University, Karachi, Pakistan
m.[email protected]du.pk
3
College of Computer Studies, AMA International University, Kingdom of Bahrain.
(s.soomro‖zeinab)@amaiu.edu.bh
4
University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
z.alansari@siswa.um.edu.my
*Correspondence: mohammad.r[email protected].edu.my
Received: 1
st
March 2019; Accepted: 15
th
March 2019; Published: 1
st
April 2019
Abstract: Routing protocols are used to transmit the packets from the source to the destination node in
mobile ad hoc networks. The intruders seek chance to pierce into the network and becomes a cause of
malfunctioning in the network. These protocols are always prone to attacks. During the phases of routing
in different types of protocols, each of the attack finds a way to degrade the performance of the routing
protocols. The reactive routing protocols DSR and AODV have lot of similar features and so are considered
in this study. In order to transmit the packets safely, a secured approach using triple factor has been
proposed. This triple factor computes the trust by using the direct information then verifies the reputation
by collecting the information from the neighbouring nodes called distributed factor and uses cryptographic
algorithm to ensure security. And to ensure that there are routes available to perform the routing process,
the reasons for such attacks are studied so as to re-integrate back the nodes in to the network, once it has
repented for being malicious before. The availability of routes increases the throughput.
Keywords: MANET; IoT; Dynamic Source Routing protocol; Ad Hoc on Demand Distance Vector Protocol;
Threats
1. Introduction
A set of mobile nodes that perform basic networking functions in an infrastructure less
environment is said be a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), as demonstrated in figure 1. Nodes that
fall within the communication range communicate with each other and which don’t come in the
Mohammad Riyaz Belgaum, Shahrulniza Musa, Mazliham MohdSu’ud, Muhammad Alam, Safeeullah Soomro and Zainab
Alansari, "Secured approach towards Reactive Routing Protocols using Triple factor in Mobile Ad hoc Networks”, Annals of
Emerging Technologies in Computing (AETiC), Print ISSN: 2516-0281, Online ISSN: 2516-029X, pp. 32-40, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1
st
April
2019, Published by International Association of Educators and Researchers (IAER), DOI: 10.33166/AETiC.2019.02.004,
Available: http://aetic.theiaer.org/archive/v3/v3n2/p4.html.
AETiC 2019, Vol. 3 No. 2 33
range follow the concept of multi-hop for communication. In the network each node plays a dual
role as a host by the forwarding and as a router in routing packets to the destination.
Figure 1. Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET)
Maintaining security is an important function of any of the routing protocol in each phase of
the networking function [1]. Because of the non-static topological behaviour of the network and due
to being the network open which allows the network to grow and shrink due to addition and
deletion of the nodes anytime gives chance for the intruder nodes to disturb the normal routing
process. And if there does not exist a common regulatory authority for authenticating and
guaranteeing the nodes then a reliable transmission is not possible.
In the current era of Internet of things (IoT), the wireless sensor networks functionality is
similar to MANETS as both are dynamic and self-organized. From the figure 2, we can see that the
IoT devices form into clusters and transmit the information through the network.
Figure 2. MANET-IoT network [2].
1.1. Security Related Goals and Challenges
Security services are needed to make sure that the data is transferred over the network with
reliability and also the keeping the resources of the system protected. To attain the objectives, the
categorizations of security services are: availability, confidentiality, authentication, integrity and
non-repudiation [3, 4].
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AETiC 2019, Vol. 3 No. 2 34
• Availability: Though the system is suffering from various problems like with bandwidth,
connectivity but the availability service ensures that still the resources are available in a timely
manner. The harmful effects of availability of a network are resource depletion attacks and packets
dropping ratio.
• Confidentiality: The information prevailing in the network is not to be shared among all
unauthorized nodes and this is achieved by Confidentiality. In order to achieve Confidentiality
many encryption techniques can be used to make only the authorized nodes can share the
transmission of information and the private and public keys.
• Authenticity: To prove a node as a legitimate user the network service used is
Authenticity. The absence of this service can make any node in the network impersonate any node,
and then having a total control capture and control over the complete network.
• Integrity: The data which is been transmitted in the network can be modified either
wantedly or sometimes unwantedly. The Integrity network service ensures that the information
which is been transmitted is not modified.
• Non-repudiation: This service guarantees that the message transmission has been done
between the two parties and it cannot be denied. Also using this service it helps in detecting and
isolating of compromised nodes in the network.
Communicating through the network in safe and secure way has been a challenging task
because of
• Not being a stable infrastructure.
• The links in the network are prone to break and not secure.
• Scarcity or overload on the system resources
• The network topology being dynamic
In this study the plan of the research is to study the various reactive routing protocols in
MANETS and analyze the threats and types of attacks in the routing protocols. The reasons for
security threats are studied for giving a solution to meet the challenges of security in the network
and carry out regular network operations in a secured way. The proposed approach will be used to
enhance the existing reactive routing protocols by considering triple factor to improve security in
while the network functions are carried out. Specifically the following issues will be addressed.
1. What are the different security threats for the reactive routing protocols?
2. What are the reasons for threats?
3. Strategies to make the network strong and secured
The researcher concentrates on the reactive routing protocols. The threats on these routing
protocols are studied; as a result of security such malicious node will be deleted from taking part in
forwarding the packet. Now the reasons for these types of threats are studied and the problems in
this strategy are considered for research. The proposed architecture in MANETS will improve
security by embedding triple factor in the reactive routing protocols while forwarding the packets
from source to destination. This could serve as reference for other researchers to enhance other
category of routing protocols based on their behavior to improve security in MANETS.
The study of working strategy of each of the reactive routing protocol along with the attacks
on them is studied. Different protocols adopt different strategies when they are prone to attacks on
the protocols. A study of reasons for the attacks and threats will be conducted which makes to
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AETiC 2019, Vol. 3 No. 2 35
adopt the triple factor to enhance security in the discovery and route maintenance during the
process of sending the packets to the destination.
2. Literature Review
The following is the summary of various routing protocols based on their behavior designed for
MANETS [5-9]. These protocols can be categorized as follows.
Figure 3. Routing Protocols
The researcher carries the research with the study of reactive routing protocols and the attacks
on them. The working functionalities of each of these reactive routing protocols [10] are
summarized as follows.
2.1. Reactive Routing Protocols
2.1.1. Dynamic Source Routing Protocol
The DSR protocol communicates by following two phases namely route discovery and
maintenance [11]. The routing information is stored while the packets are forwarded. When a
packet arrives at a node, it first checks its cache to ensure that the route for the destination node is
available as it maintains the information of the recently used routes. When there are multiple routes
to the destination then a shortest route with less hop count is selected. Because of the dynamic
changes in the topology, there is a chance of routes being broken in the route maintenance phase
still it ensures that the packet is safely transmitted to the target. There are two types of packets
floating between source and destination as route request (RREQ) and route reply (RREP).
2.1.2. Ad Hoc on Demand Distance Vector Protocol
The functionality of AODV protocol is explained in [12]. The authors here proposed an new
protocol using AODV as the base protocol where a fitness function is used. The traditional AODV
protocol has a single path from the source to the destination node while in the proposed protocol,
the authors used multipath. It is stated that the features of both DSR and DSDV are combined. The
author explains the working of AODV protocol with two phases in them as route discovery and
route maintenance. A method to identify the malicious node was explained in order to avoid
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AETiC 2019, Vol. 3 No. 2 36
forwarding of the information to the malicious node in the routing table. The solution given did not
impose any overhead on the nodes in the network.
2.1.3. Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm
The Temporally ordered Routing Algorithm considers the link reversal concept. This protocol
doesn’t allow the loops to occur [13]. There are three phases in this protocol as: (a) Route creation
happens in first phase, (b) maintenance of route happens in second phase and (c) the elimination of
invalid routes happen in third phase. All these phases go in a serial so as to safely transmit the
packets from source to destination.
2.1.4. Associativity Based Routing
The Associativity Based Routing (ABR) protocol is free from loops and has no similar packets.
Also no deadlock occurs in this protocol [14]. It focuses on route longevity. As there are very few
broken communication links and less need for reconstruction of the routes the overhead involved is
less. An improved version of ABR was to optimize the bandwidth and demand to reduce the
overhead based on the position information was proposed. It was concluded that the path setup
time was long for the routes which gave a scope for the future research to improve the ABR
Protocol.
2.1.5. Signal Stability-based Adaptive Routing Protocol
The working of SSR routing protocol states that the large routing tables are not required for
routing [15]. The network will not be congested with the control messages. From all the attacks, this
protocol is prone to a threat called denial of service attack. The Signal Stability Table maintains the
neighboring node’s signal’s strength. The authors simulated the protocol in OmNet and a metric
known as CPU usage was considered to measure the performance. It proved that when there are
malicious nodes the usage of CPU was more than in the absence of malicious nodes.
2.2. Reasons for Threats and Attacks
Reasons for threats have been summarized as shown in the following figure4.
Figure 4. Reasons for threats and attacks
For security the authors in [16] have considered the characteristics of the routing protocols in MANETS and
conducted a survey on the different types of certificate of authentication to provide better security services.
These have been categorized into centralized and distributed certificate authorities. Based on the factors and
specifications the appropriate certificate authority can be selected.
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AETiC 2019, Vol. 3 No. 2 37
3. Methodology
The characteristics and approaches to the reactive protocols along with the study of attacks and
reasons for such attacks in reactive routing protocols is conducted in order to propose a general
framework to avoid such attacks or withstand effectively from the same. The study aims to consider
the reactive routing protocols with different types of attacks on them.
The study addresses the following questions:
1. What are the reasons for threats and attacks along with malicious behaviour of the
nodes?
2. The after effects of transmitting packets bearing threats and attacks in the network and
eliminating them from the network.
3. After the reasons for threats and attacks have been identified, can a generalized
framework be proposed to enhance the reactive routing protocols to ensure
performance, security and QoS?
DSR (Dynamic Source Routing Protocol) and AODV (Ad Hoc On Demand Distance Vector
Routing Protocol) only have been considered here. Analytical Research Methodology has been
adopted in conducting the study. The various routing protocols have their own methodologies to
send the information to the destination. This research considers the reasons for the threats and
attacks in the reactive routing protocols and the effect of eliminating the nodes from the path due to
the malicious behavior of nodes. The plan is to propose a strategy which will help in maximizing
the throughput and minimizing the routing overhead on the routing protocols and thus help in the
selection of the most optimal routing path for any protocol to send the information to the
destination.
The research is organized as:
• Study the reactive routing protocols
• Analyze the reasons for threats and attacks in reactive routing protocols
Propose a strategy to handle such behavior to effectively send and receive the information by
including the framework in the existing reactive routing protocols.
4. Discussions
The study to identify the reasons of threats and attacks showed the weakness of MANETS which
put forth the challenges for security in the network with more concentration on how to deal with
such threats. The following issues have been identified during the study for reasons of threats and
attacks.
1. Nodes as hosts and routers: Because the nodes are playing a dual role of hosts and also
as a router in forwarding the packets, if some node becomes a malicious node, there has
been a dual disadvantage by misusing the traffic and by dropping the messages.
2. Scarcity of Resources: To make the information secured while transmission by use of
cryptographic algorithms makes it complicated to be implemented in an infrastructure
less network as the resources are very limited in contrast to the infrastructure
network.
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AETiC 2019, Vol. 3 No. 2 38
3. Mobility: The dynamic changing topology of network gives scope to the faulty nodes
more chances for attacks.
While forwarding the packets in the network bearing threats and attacks results in serious
problems with sometimes a no possibility to get back to the previous checkpoint having
irrecoverable loss. Therefore one of the attacks which show a good behavioral node as malicious for
a limited time to steal its identity and be a part of path in route transmission diverts the traffic to a
wrong destination. In contrast to this if the nodes that are malicious or tend to be malicious are
eliminated from the network, then at some instance there would be very less or no nodes remaining
to forward the packets.
When the nodes are cooperating in forwarding and routing these protocols perform better. In
this work, the issue of how efficiently can the packets be transmitted in the network considering the
fact that there is a type of threat called presence of malicious nodes, has been considered. The
malicious behavior of the node due to selfishness or being faulty results in significant performance
degradation with more overhead. Due to this increasing overhead, network stability decreases
when more nodes become malicious. The increase in malicious nodes reflects an increase of path
rejections, so only some percentage of secured paths are available resulting in a better throughput
and more overhead.
Figure 5. Triple factor architecture
In this work, a process of identification of misbehavior node, and action to be taken when it is
found is proposed to attain good service without causing interruption to the normal service.
Therefore, in this scheme, whenever a faulty node is detected, it triggers a response, i.e., the reaction
of neighbor nodes is considered as one of the factors in building the architecture. A node which was
mistakenly got into the malicious list or has repented for being malicious in the past turns out to be
an ideal node now should be given a chance to integrate back into the network and be a part of
routing process. This type of reintegration into the network has been proposed here which increases
the paths to the destination and improves the performance.
The proposed triple factor architecture in figure 5, works as follows. Initially when a triggers a
warn message then it checks the trust worthiness of such a node and concludes the type of
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AETiC 2019, Vol. 3 No. 2 39
misbehavior. The Reputation scheme verifies the significance of misbehavior. From the reputation
rating a node is grouped either as misbehaving or as normal and is based on the severity, that node
is eliminated from the routing process if it is proved to be a misbehaving node. The Reputation
Scheme manages the accused node information by using Distributed Factor scheme.
In this approach, to attain high security at every node, reputation rating and a trust rating have
been included which gives an impression about the neighboring nodes which comes in the
communication range. At regular intervals the Direct Factor reputation information is exchanged
with others and is considered as the first factor while based on the neighboring nodes information
the Trust ratings are updated which is classified as Distributed Factor reputation information with
prior reputation ratings is the second factor. And the information to be transmitted uses any basic
cryptographic algorithm as the third factor. So this triple factor will help in transmission of packets
in a secured way to reach the destination in the reactive routing protocols like DSR and AODV as
such protocols allow to integrate this new approach. Moreover DSR and AODV have most common
phases of route discovery and route maintenance. Implementation of this phase at every node in
route discovery phase will improve the throughput with low overhead on the network in a secured
way.
5. Conclusion and Future Enhancements
The proposed integrated approach at every node improves the throughput with low network
overhead even in presence of malicious nodes. The dynamic behavior of the nodes may turn into
malicious or sometimes repent from being malicious. The triple factor inclusion not only allows
integrating a faulty misbehavior back into the network after considering the reason for misbehavior
but also allows adding basic cryptographic algorithm to have secured packet transmission through
the path. As the nodes are not eliminated from the network unless and until they fail in proving
their trust, the network is strong and will result in more throughputs with low network overload.
Further these protocols can be simulated by making this architecture as a part of the routing
process, which will be carried out as our next following research.
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© 2019 by the author(s). Published by Annals of Emerging Technologies in Computing
(AETiC), under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY)
license which can be accessed at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0.
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