New approach for detection and defending the wormhole attacks in Wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

A Wireless ad-hoc network is a temporary network set up by wireless mobile computers (or nodes) moving arbitrary in the places that have no network infrastructure. Due to security vulnerabilities of the routing protocols, wireless ad-hoc networks are unprotected to attacks of the malicious nodes. The wormhole attack is possible even if the attacker has not compromised any hosts, and even if all communication provides authenticity and confidentiality. In the wormhole attack, an attacker records packets (or bits) at one location in the network, tunnels them to another location, and retransmits them there into the network. The wormhole attack can form a serious threat in wireless networks, especially against many ad hoc network routing protocols and location-based wireless security systems. For example, most existing ad hoc network routing protocols, without some mechanism to defend against the wormhole attack, would be unable to send routes longer than one or two hops, severely disrupting communication. We present a new, general mechanism, called MultiPath Routing, for detecting and thus defending against wormhole attacks.