BLACKHOLE ATTACK

Black hole attacks are a type of denial of service attack in which a malicious node is
introduced into a network and causes all packets destined for the network to be consumed by
the black hole itself. The goal of this type of attack is to halt packet transmission at the
routing layer. A black hole attack occurs when a rogue node requests that all other nodes
transfer packets in its direction via phony routing.

A black hole attack can happen in a network in one of three ways: individually, in groups, or
together. Ad hoc networks are particularly vulnerable to a single black hole attack. When
there are multiple black holes in a network, the attack is called a Multiple black hole attack.
Cooperative black hole attacks occur when a number of malicious nodes work together to
cause the transmission of data between the source and the target nodes to fail.

The RREQ packet is sent from the source node to the neighboring node during Route
discovery. Send RREP if it reaches the final hop on the path to the destination. The black
hole node reports to the receiver that it is in possession of the new node. This malicious node
delivers the RREP with the greatest sequence number without first validating the route table.
The initial AODV algorithm decided that the path through the node with the highest RREP
number was the shortest, therefore data packets were routed through it. A malicious node will
consume all packets directed at it, rather than passing them on to the next neighboring node.