Geographic wormhole detection in wireless sensor networks

PLoS One. 2015 Jan 20;10(1):e0115324. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0115324. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are ubiquitous and pervasive, and therefore; highly susceptible to a number of security attacks. Denial of Service (DoS) attack is considered the most dominant and a major threat to WSNs. Moreover, the wormhole attack represents one of the potential forms of the Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Besides, crafting the wormhole attack is comparatively simple; though, its detection is nontrivial. On the contrary, the extant wormhole defense methods need both specialized hardware and strong assumptions to defend against static and dynamic wormhole attack. The ensuing paper introduces a novel scheme to detect wormhole attacks in a geographic routing protocol (DWGRP). The main contribution of this paper is to detect malicious nodes and select the best and the most reliable neighbors based on pairwise key pre-distribution technique and the beacon packet. Moreover, this novel technique is not subject to any specific assumption, requirement, or specialized hardware, such as a precise synchronized clock. The proposed detection method is validated by comparisons with several related techniques in the literature, such as Received Signal Strength (RSS), Authentication of Nodes Scheme (ANS), Wormhole Detection uses Hound Packet (WHOP), and Wormhole Detection with Neighborhood Information (WDI) using the NS-2 simulator. The analysis of the simulations shows promising results with low False Detection Rate (FDR) in the geographic routing protocols.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Computer Communication Networks*
  • Computer Security*
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Wireless Technology*

Grants and funding

This work is carried out as a part of the Mobile Cloud Computing research project funded by the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education under the University of Malaya High Impact Research Grant with reference UM.C/HIR/MOHE/FCSIT/03. This work also is partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant no. 61300220 and NSFC project 61371098. Fars Regional Electric Co. provided support in the form of a salary for author AS, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.