CRY OLSR : Crypto Optimized Link State Routing
for MANET
Fouzi Semchedine
Institute of Optic and
Precision Mechanic (IOMP)
University of Setif, Algeria
Research Unit LAMOS et des Telecommunications Avanceees) Laboratory
University of Bejaia, Algeria
AbstractAd hoc mobile network usually called MANET
(Mobile Ad hoc Network) is an autonomous system of mobile
nodes connected by wireless links and forms a temporary network
with a variable topology. MANET work without preexisting fixed
infrastructures and without a centralized administration. The
performance of a MANET network is strictly related to the
capacity of the routing protocol implemented to adapt itself to
the unpredictable changes in the network topology and the link
state. One of these routing protocols is OLSR (Optimized Link
State Routing Protocol) which assumes that all the nodes are
in a trusted environment. However OLSR is vulnerable to all
kinds of malicious attacks. In this paper, we proposed a security
mechanism that is an extension of OLSR, called CRY-OLSR. This
new mechanism is based on an asymmetric cryptographic that
allows the identification and then the isolation of malicious nodes
in the network. The simulation results, using OPNET simulator,
show the effectiveness of our mechanism.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Mobile ad hoc networks, also called MANET (Mobile Ad-
hoc Network) are formed dynamically by a large number of
mobile stations (nodes) that connect without using an existing
fixed infrastructure and by using wireless interfaces (radio
waves). The nodes can interact and cooperate to exchange
services. These nodes are free to move and organize themselves
arbitrarily, involving a wide variability in the network topology.
Each node is able to communicate directly with its neighbors
(located in its coverage area), and through which they pass to
communicate with more remote nodes which may serve as a
relay for other nodes in the network [8].
However, the open nature of these networks allows ma-
licious nodes to access to the exchanged information and to
introduce attacks and vulnerabilities. Thus, the safety aspect of
routing protocols in ad hoc networks is difficult to implement
in practice. It is one of the main barriers to widespread
deployment of these networks. The research works in this field
are trying to establish a compromise between efficiency and
robustness of the proposed security solutions and its overall
cost.
In the literature, several attacks on the MANET have been
identified by researchers. In this paper, we focus on the well-
known black-hole attack. In a BlackHole attack, the malicious
node is trying to attract the most possible paths which allow
controlling most of the data flow through the network. So, the
attacker must appear to others as very attractive and presents
978-1-5090-5146-5/16/$31.00 2016 IEEE
Ali Moussaoui ,
Khadidja Zouaoui and
Sarra Mehamel
ETA (Laboratoire DElectronique
Computer Science Department
University of Borj Bou Arreridj, Algeria
optimal routes. The attacker usually up at a strategic location
and removes all the messages that it must retransmit which
causes a black hole in the network [9].
Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol is one
of the routing protocols exposed to this type of attacks. In
the literature, several security extensions of OLSR based on
cryptography have been proposed [3], [2], [7], [4], [6], [5].
Their common point is the use of digital signatures to ensure
authentication and the integrity of control messages. However,
OLSR is always exposed to the black hole attacks. Indeed, a
malicious node can force its election as a Multi Point Relay
(MPR) by constantly putting its willingness field equal to
will always in each HELLO packet. Based on the OLSR
rules, its neighbors will always select the malicious node as
MPR. Using this technique, a malicious node can easily obtain
a privileged position in the network. It can then use this
position to launch a simple black hole attack or a cooperative
one. In this paper, we propose an approach called Crypto
Optimized Link State Routing (CRY OLSR), which is an
extension of the standard OLSR routing protocol to secure
it against the black hole attack.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the
principle of the new approach CRY OLSR. In Section 3, we
discuss the simulation results of the approach compared to the
standard OLSR and we conclude the work in Section 4.
II. C RYPTO O PTIMIZED L INK S TATE ROUTING
In this section, we present the different assumptions and
details of our approach to secure OLSR against basic and
cooperative black hole attacks.
A. Assumptions
For the design of our approach, we assume that the
wireless connections are bidirectional because it requires a
bi-directional exchange of packets. We also assume that the
network nodes share a common key. Furthermore, we assume
that the attack is external (intruder nodes do not have the key
of a node). Finally, a node S should not trust a neighbor X
showing characteristics of a malicious node. We note that these
assumptions are reasonable and achievable in practice.
B. Presentation of CRY OLSR
In OLSR, a malicious node can force its election as MPR
by putting the willingness field at will always in each
HELLO packet. Therefore, its neighbors will always select it
as MPR. Thus, the malicious node can easily obtain as MPR
a privileged position in the network and launch a denial-of-
service attack (a simple black hole or a cooperative black
hole attack). To address this attack, we propose a new exten-
sion of OLSR, called Crypto Optimized Link State Routing
(CRY OLSR) to reduce its devastating impact. CRY OLSR
elects the MPR nodes from the list of trusted nodes to
avoid compromise nodes (blacklisted). Also, the sender of a
Topology Control message (TC) should be reliable (the case
of a black hole TC: the malicious node can send a topology Fig. 1. Example of CRY OLSR HELLO message sent to a suspect node.
message without be selected as MPR). In our solution, we
use Rivest Shamir Adleman function (RSA) [1] to ensure the
confidentiality and the integrity of data and to detect malicious
nodes.
In order to facilitate understanding the CRY OLSR ap-
proach, we consider the following steps.
Step 1: Generation of the attack
In the case of HELLO messages and to simulate a black
hole attack, we change the role of some nodes to be malicious
nodes by putting their willingness equal to will always
and the MPRs set of the malicious node equal to 1 (the case
of cooperative black holes). Also, we do not attribute the RSA Fig. 2. Sending encrypted message to the suspect node (MPR selection).
parameters (p, q) to the nodes selected as black holes.
For the simulation of an attack in the case of TC messages,
we randomly select a node that acts as a malicious node and Step 3: Sending the TC message
sends TC messages with a wrong topology by completing the The malicious node can send a TC message without be
table of MPR SELECTOR SET by all its neighbor nodes. selected as MPR. First, we change the format of the TC
Step 2: detection of malicious nodes and selection of message and we add the field: encrypted msg tc, bringing the
trust MPRs encrypted message. The figure 3 illustrates the structure of the
modified TC message.
In addition to the basic fields of the HELLO message
(Reserved, Htime, Willingness, Link Code Link Message
Size, Neighbor Interface Address) [10], we also added three
fields: encrypted msg, dest addr and demand pr dealing re-
spectively: the encrypted message, the destination address and
an integer equal to 1 or 0 to allow or prevent sending the
verification message. The structure of the modified HELLO
message is shown in the figure 1, which represents a HELLO
message sent to a suspicious node.
Only the suspect nodes receive the modified HELLO mes- Fig. 3. The new format of the TC message.
sages, the other nodes receive the standard HELLO message.
Figure 2 illustrates how we detected and putted suspicious
nodes in the blacklist and check their membership to the This attack intends to provide false information on the
network. Finally, only black-hole nodes remain in the black list network topology. In this attack, a malicious node sends TC
(the black-hole nodes are nodes that fail to decrypt messages messages without being selected as MPR by its neighborhood.
in the field encrypted msg). At the reception of the TC message and since the attacker
cannot encrypt the message in the field encrypted msg tc (it
In this attack, a malicious node generates a HELLO needs proof that it was actually chosen as MRP by another
message in which it announced its field willingness equal node), the attack will be quickly detected after verification of
to will always. Thus, all traffic will be sent to the attacker. the attached fields and the wrong TC message is rejected.
This attack is easily detected by the nodes that will receive
the message generated by the attacker after checking the III. VALIDATION OF THE APPROACH
encrypted msg field, because the attacker cannot encrypt the
message in a proper way. In this section, we present the validation results of the
approach CRY OLSR by comparing it with the standard
 TABLE I. - SIMULATION PARAMETERS -

Parameter Value
Simulation area 1000m X 1000m
Mobility model RWP model
Number of nodes 50
Node speed 20 m/s
Pause time 5s
Hello interval 2.0s
TC interval 5s
Topology Hold time 15.0 s (3xTC INTERVAL)
Physical layer IEEE 802.11
Transmit power 0.001w
Simulation time 1500 seconds (25 minutes).

OLSR.
Fig. 4. The number of sent HELLO messages.
Several simulators for wireless networks have been pro-
posed in recent years, including NS-2, glomosim, jist /
SWANS, GTSNetS, OMNeT ++, Opnet, etc. These simula-
tors offer all an avarice programming environment for the OLSR cannot prevent the black hole attack of TC messages
implementation and the performance evaluation of the com- which involves sending TC messages without being selected as
munication protocols. The availability of standard OLSR code MPR. By cons, the CRY OLSR protocol can detect and stop
in Opnet motivated us to choose it for the validation of the the operation of these attacker nodes and, therefore, reduce
approach. the number of TC messages (this ensures that there will be no
wrong TC messages).
The evaluation of our protocol is done on a network area
of 1000m x 1000m with 50 nodes. The mobility model used
in the simulation is the RWP (Random Way Point) with a
speed of mobility varied between 0 and 20 m/s for each node.
The Topology Hold Time (the expiry time for entries in the
topology table) is fixed to 15s. The TABLE I summarizes the
different network parameters used in the simulation.
In order to evaluate the performance of the CRY OLSR
protocol, we consider the following performance metrics:
Total Hello Message sent: represents the number of
Hello messages sent in the network.
Total TC Message sent: represents the number of TC
messages sent in the network.

A. Results and discussions

The Figure 4 shows the simulation results in terms of
number of Hello messages sent in the network. The Figure
clearly shows that the number of Hello messages sent with
OLSR is higher than CRY OLSR. These results recorded by
OLSR are due to the fact that the latter does not incorporate
a security mechanism to detect the malicious node. However,
the CRY OLSR protocol can detect the malicious nodes and
isolates them from the network. In other words, the number
of nodes in the case of CRY-OLSR is less than the number
of nodes in the case of OLSR. As the number of nodes in the
case of OLSR is the larger and the HELLO message interval
is fixed, this means that the number of HELLO messages in
OLSR will be greater, which is shown by the results of the
Figure 4.
The Figure 5 shows the simulation results in terms of
number of TC messages sent in the network. The Figure shows
that the number of TC messages sent with the CRY OLSR
protocol is lower than OLSR. This is due to the fact that
Fig. 5. The number of sent TC messages.
IV. C ONCLUSION
Secure routing in ad hoc networks remains a major prob-
lem. It often faces the difficulty of proposing relatively robust
mechanisms to encounter the different possible attacks, caused
by external intruders and compromised nodes, without affect-
ing the overall performance of the network and the routing
protocols.
The OLSR routing protocol is often exposed to the black
hole attacks. Therefore, we have proposed an extension of this
protocol to secure its algorithm. Simulation results have shown
that the adopted approach had improved the performance of
OLSR in terms of sent Hello and TC messages.
 R EFERENCES
[1] R. L. Rivest, A. Shamir, and L. Adleman, A method for obtaining digital
signatures and public-key cryptosystems, Communications of the ACM,
21(2), 120-126, 1978.
[2] A. Hafslund, A. Tonnesen, R. B. Rotvik, J. Andersson, and O. Kure,
Secure Extension to the OLSR protocol, In Proceedings of the OLSR
Interop and Workshop, San Diego, August 2004.
[3] C. Adjih, P. Muhlethaler, and D. Raffo, Detailed specifications of a
security architecture for OLSR, Doctoral dissertation, INRIA, 2006.
[4] D. Raffo, C. Adjih, T. Clausen, and P. Mhlethaler, An advanced
signature system for OLSR, In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop
on Security of ad hoc and sensor networks (pp. 10-16), ACM, October
2004.
[5] M. Wang, L. Lamont, P. Mason, and M. Gorlatova, An effective
intrusion detection approach for OLSR MANET protocol, In Secure
Network Protocols, 2005.(NPSec). 1st IEEE ICNP Workshop on (pp.
55-60). IEEE, November 2005.
[6] J. P. Vilela, and J. Barros, A feedback reputation mechanism to secure
the optimized link state routing protocol, In Security and Privacy
in Communications Networks and the Workshops, 2007. SecureComm
2007. Third International Conference on (pp. 294-303). IEEE, September
2007.
[7] A. R. Khakpour, M. Laurent-Maknavicius, and H. Chaouchi, WATCH-
MAN: An overlay distributed AAA architecture for mobile ad hoc net-
works, The Third International Conference on Availability, Reliability
and Security, 2008 (pp. 144-152). IEEE, March 2008.
[8] A. Moussaoui, and A. Boukeream, A survey of routing protocols based
on link-stability in mobile ad hoc networks, Journal of Network and
Computer Applications, 47, 1-10, 2015.
[9] F. H. Tseng, L. D. Chou, and H. C. Chao, A survey of black hole
attacks in wireless mobile ad hoc networks, Human-centric Computing
and Information Sciences, 1(1), 1-16, 2011.
[10] T. Clausen, and P. Jacquet, (2003), Optimized link state routing
protocol (OLSR), RFC 3626, October 2003.