Black Hole Attack in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Challenges and Directions

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a dynamic wireless network with no fixed infrastructure. The nodes move arbitrarily and are capable of communicating with each other without a central authority. MANETs are well suited for several situations such as emergencies, vehicular networks, and military operations. However, the flexible nature of MANET exposes it to attacks such as black hole attacks. The black hole attack is considered as one of the most predominant attacks that poses a threat to MANET. In this attack, an illegitimate node informs a source node of having the optimal route to the destination node, resulting in data packets being redirected and eventually dropped by this illegitimate node. Several works have been carried out to address this issue. This paper presents an overview of solutions proposed to mitigate black hole attacks, research limitations to the proposed works, and future works that need to be carried out.