DeWorm: A Simple Protocol to Detect Wormhole Attacks in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

The wormhole attack is considered to be a serious security attack in multihop ad hoc and sensor networks. We propose "DeWorm", a simple protocol to effectively detect wormhole attacks without the need for special hardware and/or strict location or synchronization requirements. DeWorm makes use of discrepancies in routing information between neighbors to detect wormholes. A simulation based analysis of DeWorm for a variety of scenarios shows that the proposed protocol can detect wormhole attacks with a high detection rate, a low false positive rate and low overhead. Further, in comparison to other wormhole detection protocols, the proposed protocol is simple, localized, and capable of detecting a variety of types of wormhole attacks including physical layer wormholes.