Analysis of wormhole intrusion attacks in MANETS

Abstract

Wormhole refers to an attack on MANET routing protocols in which colluding nodes create an illusion that two remote regions of a MANET are directly connected through nodes that appear to be neighbors but are actually distant from one another. Our focus in this paper is a particular form of the wormhole attack called the self-contained in-band wormhole. In this paper we analyze the criterion for successful wormhole attack on a MANET. Based on results collected from a Qualnet simulation, we evaluate the likelihood of such an attack. We further classify the wormhole scenarios into successful, unsuccessful, doubtful, interesting, and uninteresting. We also define wormhole strength and observe that the detection ratio of the technique proposed in varies with wormhole strength as well as with the network topology. The simulation statistics also show that the wormholes having higher strength have a higher detection ratio as compared to the ones with lower strength.