Merkle tree‐based wormhole attack avoidance mechanism in low power and lossy network based networks

Abstract

ABSTRACT Smart metering application has received a lot of attention from the research community lately. Usually, low power and lossy network runs on routing protocol for low power and lossy networks protocol, which constructs a directed acyclic graph structure for its normal operation. In this paper, we devise a wormhole attack scenario in such a network. Furthermore, we propose a Merkle tree‐based authentication mechanism, which runs on the notion of constructing a tree of hashed security information. We analyze the approach by formulating the wormhole attack scenario as a graph theoretic problem and show the effectiveness of the proposed Merkle tree‐based approach for authenticating communications. Furthermore, we perform simulations in network simulator 2 to observe the network performance by adopting a Merkle tree‐based approach to prevent from disrupting the links, and we observe better throughput, reduction in jitter, and end‐to‐end delay as compared with scenarios with wormhole attacks and no avoidance mechanism. In the end, we take a step toward optimizing the performance of the mechanism by proposing an effective tree traversal algorithm, which works on the notion of electing nodes as a root in a large scale network from where a Merkle tree will be originated. The mechanism with the traversal algorithm assists in managing the authentication in a huge network, which is broken down into many trees avoiding wormhole attacks in the network. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.