A Distributed Method for Preventing Wormhole Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

A Distributed Method for Preventing Wormhole Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Seyed Morteza Mirbostani, Mehregan Mahdavi

Abstract

As sensor networks become wide-spread in various applications, security issues emerge as the main concern. Wormhole attack as a severe security threat is capable of disturbing and even disabling the functionality of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) because merely authenticity and confidentiality approaches are unable to prevent it. In this paper, we propose a distributed method for detecting three kinds of wormhole attacks in WSNs using information provided by each legitimate network node, about its possible neighbors. Our mechanism is comprised of a routing and a detection algorithm which is capable of handling both static and dynamic wormholes. According to the simulation results, detecting wormholes with low false alarm rate (FAR), low failure detection rate (FDR), and estimating their locations are the main advantages of our method compared to the existing approaches.

Keywords

Sensor Networks, Security, Wormhole Attacks, Attack Detection and Prevention, Secure Routing

References