Prevention of Blackhole Attack in MANET Using Certificateless Signature Scheme

Mobile AdHoc Networks (MANETs) are the network of self-configuring nodes. Such nodes communicate through single as well as multi-hop modes without the aid of any centralized administrator or pre-existing network infrastructure. Due to this reason, MANETs have gained a highly significance in modern wireless networking technologies. Such networks are extremely vulnerable to one of the security attack i.e. blackhole attack. It is a malicious node when an attacker is able to send a fake route reply to the originator of a route request packet. Such attackers discard the legitimate packets and replay packets in the whole network thereby adversely affecting network performance. Most of the security protocols for MANET are using bilinear pairing methods to provide security against security attacks and it takes high computing cost for the computation of pairing operations. Nowadays, researchers are using certificate-less signature schemes in distributed environments to provide efficient security. This signature scheme is very popular because it does not use any certificate authority for the management of security certificates. In this paper, we proposed an efficient technique to prevent blackhole attack in MANET using RSA-based certificateless signature scheme without using any bilinear pairing operations. Our scheme provides security against forgery and blackhole attacks and is evaluated under a discrete logarithm problem. Proposed scheme outperforms existing schemes in terms of these metrics viz., throughput, packet delivery ratio, routing overhead and end-to-end delay when we are varying mobility and fixed percentage of malicious nodes. Our proposed scheme not only detects or prevents the blackhole attack but it is also capable to provide important security services viz., integrity, authentication and non-repudiation.