A Black Hole Attack Model for Reactive Ad-Hoc Protocols

Net-Centric Warfare places the network in the center of all operations, making it a critical resource to attack and defend during wartime. This thesis examines one particular network attack, the Black Hole attack, to determine if an analytical model can be used to predict the impact of this attack on ad-hoc networks. An analytical Black Hole attack model is developed for reactive ad-hoc network protocols DSR and AODV. To simplify topology analysis, a hypercube topology is used to approximate ad-hoc topologies that have the same average node degree. An experiment is conducted to compare the predicted results of the analytical model against simulated Black Hole attacks on a variety of ad-hoc networks. The results show that the model describes the general order of growth in Black Hole attacks as a function of the number of Black Holes in a given network. The model accuracy maximizes when both the hypercube approximation matches the average degree and number of nodes of the ad-hoc topology. For this case, the model falls within the 95% confidence intervals of the estimated network performance loss for 17 out of 20 measured scenarios for AODV and 7 out of 20 for DSR. The original document contains color images.