Lightweight Detection and Isolation of Black Hole Attacks in Connected Vehicles

Connected Vehicles (CVs) can be exposed to black hole attacks that deceive legitimate nodes by falsifying an attractive route to a destination node. This occurs when an attacker sends a packet to the source node confirming the existence of a fresh route. In this paper, we propose a Black Hole Detection Protocol (BlackDP) that works on a highway divided into clusters and monitored by Road Side Units (RSUs) to detect both single and cooperative black hole attacks. Every RSU is tasked with performing both detection and isolation of black hole attacks for their respective highway section after authentication violations and suspicious route establishment activities that have been reported by a legitimate node. The design goal of BlackDP is to decouple the detection process from mobile nodes and construct a trusted semi-centric detection process that can collect needed information for lightweight detection and reliable isolation of malicious nodes. We validate BlackDP in a simulated highway environment to demonstrate its effectiveness.