RTT-TC: A topological comparison based method to detect wormhole attacks in MANET

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are susceptible to various routing attacks carried out by internal or external adversaries, where wormhole attack is considered one of the most threatening attacks. In a wormhole attack, the colluders are unauthenticated entities which silently record packets at one location and tunnel them to another location in the network. This type of attack can be launched even if the network uses authentication. In this paper, we present a new detection mechanism called RTT-TC, which is based on round trip time (RTT) measurements and topological comparisons (TC). We evaluated our scheme with MANET running ad hoc on demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol. Simulation results show that our proposed method can achieve both high detection rate and accuracy of alarms.