Security upgrade against RREQ flooding attack by using balance index on vehicular ad hoc network.

VANET is an ad hoc network that formed between vehicles. Security in VANET plays vital role. AODV routing protocol is a reactive or on-demand routing protocol which means if there is data to be send then the path will create. AODV is the most commonly used topology based routing protocol for VANET. Using of broadcast packets in the AODV route discovery phase caused it is extremely vulnerable against DOS and DDOS flooding attacks. Flooding attack is type of a denial of service attack that causes loss of network bandwidth and imposes high overhead to the network. The method proposed in this paper called Balanced AODV (B-AODV) because it expects all network node behave normally. If network nodes are out of the normal behavior (too much route request) then they identified as malicious node. B-AODV is designed with following feature: (1) The use of adaptive threshold according to network conditions and nodes behavior (balance index) (2) Not using additional routing packets to detect malicious nodes (3) Perform detection and prevention operations independently on each node (4) Perform detection and prevention operations in real time (5) No need for promiscuous mode. This method for detection and prevention flooding attack uses average and standard deviation. In this method each node is employing balance index for acceptation or rejection RREQ packets. The results of the simulation in NS2 indicates B-AODV is resilience against flooding attack and prevent loss of network bandwidth. Comparing between AODV with B-AODV in normal state (non-attacker) shows B-AODV is exactly match with AODV in network performance, this means that the B-AODV algorithm does not impose any overhead and false positive to AODV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]