3L-AODV: Three Layer Security Protocol for Grayhole Attack Mitigation in MANET

As the mobile ad hoc networks infrastructure has no centralized points of connections, the traffic from a source to a destination passes through number of intermediate nodes. When more than one neighbor node is available, the traffic passes through one of them based on some criteria. If a node behaves maliciously in all of the connections and drops the traffic, it creates a security blackhole, while a malicious node that behaves normally is some of the connections creates a security grayhole. Since the malicious node behaves normally in some connections, mitigating this attack is challenging. In this paper, we proposed 3L-AODV, a security protocol that uses three layers of protection and detection to mitigate the grayhole attack. As it does not require any modification on the AODV protocol, it can be implemented on any network that its routing is based on AODV. The analysis of our results shows that 3L-AODV could mitigate the grayhole attack without affecting the performance of the network.