Black-hole attacks, also called packet drop attacks or
sinkhole attacks, are one type of denial-of-service attack that
can be employed on an ad hoc network such as a wireless
sensor network [2]. Given the collaborative nature of a wireless
sensor network, a malicious node can severely impact the
performance of the network by broadcasting false routing
information. Traditional routing protocols for use on wireless
sensor networks include the Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance
Vector (AODV) [3] protocol and the Dynamic Source Routing
(DSR) [4] protocol. AODV is a reactive, distance vector
routing protocol and computes routes only when they are
required. DSR is similar to AODV in many ways but its main
distinction is that it uses source routing instead of relying on
the routing table of intermediate devices. To execute a black
hole attack on a network running DSR as its routing protocol,
a malicious node would simply pretend to have a short route to
the destination to trick other nodes into sending it traffic. This
malicious node would then drop this traffic instead of passing
it on as expected by the other nodes.