As demand increases for ubiquitous network facilities, infrastructure-less and self-configuring systems like Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) are gaining popularity. MANET routing security however, is one of the most significant challenges to wide scale adoption, with wormhole attacks being an especially severe MANET routing threat. This is because wormholes are able to disrupt a major component of network traffic, while concomitantly being extremely difficult to detect. This paper introduces a new wormhole detection paradigm based upon Traversal Time and Hop Count Analysis (TTHCA), which in comparison to existing algorithms, consistently affords superior detection performance, allied with low false positive rates for all wormhole variants. Simulation results confirm that the TTHCA model exhibits robust wormhole route detection in various network scenarios, while incurring only a small network overhead. This feature makes TTHCA an attractive choice for MANET environments which generally comprise devices, such as wireless sensors, which possess a limited processing capability.
Keywords: DelPHI; MANET; MANET security; MHA; WAP; hop count; mobile networks; routing security; traversal time; wormhole attack.