Volume 17, Number 6

Enhancing Manet Security Through Blockchain-Driven Multipath Route Authentication

  Authors

Gagan Bhatt, Krishna Kaniyal, Jayant Pal and Jogendra Kumar, GBPIET Ghurdauri Pauri Garhwal Uttarakhand, India

  Abstract

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are wireless networks are decentralized in nature, and nodes that do not depend on any infrastructure to connect to one another. MANETs are exposed to many security attacks, which include route hijacking, black hole attacks, and Sybil attacks, that threaten confidentiality, data integrity, and communication path availability. Multipath routing involves taking multiple paths to transmit data among nodes, which helps in improving or making the MANETs reliable and tolerant to the faults. Multipath routing guarantees continuous communication since there is redundancy in the routes. But in the absence of an effective route authentication and validation mechanism, the routing information can be manipulated or hand-formed by malicious nodes, which may result in directing the traffic in the wrong direction, or dropping the packets, or even tampering with the data. Blockchain technology featuring decentralization, immutability, and transparency, proposes a decent solution that could provide security to routing in MANETs. With its authentication of routes via a distributed, tamper-proof ledger, blockchain also keeps out invalid routes through which data may be transmitted. Blockchain is decentralized, whereby the nodes could verify the authenticity of routes themselves, thus decreasing the chances of attacks such as route spoofing and malicious route injections. Purposed a Secure Multipath Routing Framework (SMRF) that combines blockchain and multipath routing in MANETs in this paper. The main objective of the framework is increased security, dependability, and efficacy by investing in the blockchain to complete route authentication. SMRF makes sure that routing information is recorded in a transparent ledger to avoid it being manipulated by malicious actors. It dynamically maintains the blockchain when the topology of the network changes, gives real-time information on routes, and makes sure that only valid routes are traversed. SMRF further improves fault tolerance and data transmission efficiency through addition of multipath routing. SMRF guarantees that data gets transmitted on the most reliable paths by choosing secure paths according to such criteria as the node reliability, energy consumption as well and link quality. Not only does this increase security, but it also enhances the performance of the network because some of the heavy traffic is spread to other paths. To analyze how effective our framework can be, we do the simulation process by implementing the simulation via the NS-3 network simulator, which largely considers the most relevant performance parameters in the framework, namely security, packet delivery ratio, throughput, end-to-end, and energy consumption. The results indicate that SMRF offers immense gain in security by eliminating malicious attacks i.e. attacks like black hole, Sybil attack ,with high packet throughput and delivery ratio. It is resilient when using colors to code multipath routing and reliable since colors can be used at multiple levels of security and authentication of the blockchain technology in routing paths, ensures integrity of the path.

  Keywords

Route Authentication, Tamper-proof Ledger, Decentralized Networks, Route Spoofing, Malicious Node Manipulation, Secure Multipath Routing Framework (SMRF), Network Topology