Int. J. Networking and Virtual Organisations, Vol. 19, Nos. 2/3/4, 2018 153 Copyright © 2018 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Malicious node identification routing and protection mechanism for vehicular ad-hoc network against various attacks Zaid A. Abdulkader* Al Iraqia University, Baghdad, Iraq and Faculty of Computer Sciences and Information Technology, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia Email: zaid.researchs@gmail.com *Corresponding author Azizol Abdullah, Mohd Taufik Abdullah and Zuriati Ahmad Zukarnain Faculty of Computer Sciences and Information Technology, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia Email: azizol@upm.edu.my Email: taufik@upm.edu.my Email: zuriati@upm.edu.my Abstract: Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is a promising approach that provides safety measures and other application to the drivers on the vehicles. The focus of VANETs is to fulfil user’s requirements on road side area which increases the safe and comfortable journey for users. It provides good communication like mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) when there is no intruders exist in the network. In VANET, communication depends on road safety such as emergency situation, vehicles tracking, messages monitoring and tracking of vehicles. But many attackers like black hole attack, wormhole attack and Sybil attack are more vulnerable to VANET. In order to provide efficient communication, we provide a malicious node identification routing mechanism which gives the valid route between two vehicles. To avoid several attacks, we introduce a protection mechanism that includes key management for preventing our network. Our proposed system provides efficient communication on VANET that focus on throughput, end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, detection rate and misdetection rate. Keywords: black hole attack; Sybil attack; wormhole attack; vehicular ad-hoc network; VANET; AODV routing; elliptical curve cryptography. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Abdulkader, Z.A., Abdullah, A., Abdullah, M.T. and Zukarnain, Z.A. (2018) ‘Malicious node identification routing and protection mechanism for vehicular ad-hoc network against various attacks’, Int. J. Networking and Virtual Organisations, Vol. 19, Nos. 2/3/4, pp.153–175.