Wormhole attacks in wireless adhoc networks and their counter measurements: A survey

Abstract

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a self-organizing, infrastructure less, multi-hop network. The wireless and distributed nature of MANETs poses a great challenge to system security designers. Ad hoc networks are by nature very open to anyone. Their biggest advantage is also one of their biggest disadvantages: Anyone with the proper hardware and knowledge of the network topology and protocols can connect to the network. This allows potential attackers to infiltrate the network and carry out attacks on its participants with the purpose of stealing or altering information. A specific type of attack, the Wormhole attack does not require exploiting any nodes in the network and can interfere with the route establishment process. The entire routing system in MANET can even be brought down using the wormhole attack. This paper discusses the modes of wormholes, how wormholes disrupts routing in AODV, DSR, OLSR and then discusses the solutions and countermeasures on wormholes.