A Novel Algorithm for Early Detection and Prevention of Rushing Attack in AODV MANETs

Abstract Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) attacks can be classified into active and passive attacks. Among active attacks, the rushing attack is one of the basic network layer attacks. In MANET, it early exploits the duplicate suppression mechanism of Ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) protocol by quickly forwarding the RREQ packet to neighboring nodes without processing it, to influence a source node to include the rushed node in its route, which leads to data loss when transmitting the data packet to the correct destination node. This Early Rushing Attack Detection and Prevention in AODV MANETs (E-RADP) paper is proposed to fill this gap.To advance the security of our proposed algorithm, threshold value, ratio, and intermediate delay are introduced in rushing attack detection and prevention processes. For the performance analysis, the network simulator NS2.35 is used. The proposed protocol is compared with AODV, Prevention of Multiple Rushing Attacks Using AODV Routing Protocol (PMRA), and Rushing Attack Prevention with modified AODV (MAODV) based on true positive, true negative, false positive, and false negative values of normal and malicious nodes, and throughput, packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay. E-RADP improves the rushing attack detection rate (DR), throughput, and packet loss rate (PLR) of existing protocols. It also improves the end-to-end delay (E2ED) of existing protocols when a rushing node is present in a MANET. Thus, the performance analysis shows that E-RADP is highly secure and faster than existing algorithms. We make the codes, and data for our E-RADP publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15475513.