Detection of Hidden Wormhole Attack in Wireless Sensor Networks using Neighborhood and Connectivity Information

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have inspired many applications such as military applications, environmental monitoring and other fields. WSN has emergence in various fields, so security is very important issue for sensor networks. Security comes from attacks. Due to the wireless and distributed nature anyone can connect with the network. Among all possible attacks, wormholes are very hard to detect because they can cause damage to the network without knowing the protocols used in the network. It is a powerful attack that can be conducted without requiring any cryptographic breaks. Wormholes are hard to detect because they use a private, out-of-band channel invisible to the underlying sensor network. In this paper we have proposed a wormhole detection protocol based on neighborhood and connectivity information. Performance analysis shows that our proposed approach can effectively detect wormhole attack with less storage cost. Keywords: Wireless sensor network, wormhole, out-of-band, security, neighborhood

Providing Immunity against Wormhole Attack in Wireless Network Coding System

ABSTRACT: To improve the system performance of wireless Network, network coding is shown to be effective approach and it is totally different from traditional network. If wormhole attacks are launched in routing, the nodes close to attackers will receive more packets than they should and be considered as having a good capability in help forwarding packets .So, other nodes will be correspondingly contributing less. This unfair distribution of workload will result in inefficient resource utilization and reduce system performance. Here we detect and thus defend wormhole attack using Expected Transmission count technique, a centralized algorithm and DAWN algorithm. For data transfer we use Random linear Network coding (RLNC) System

Security wireless sensor networks: prospects, challenges, and future

With the advancements of networking technologies and miniaturization of electronic devices, wireless sensor network (WSN) has become an emerging area of research in academic, industrial, and defense sectors. Different types of sensing technologies combined with processing power and wireless communication capability make sensor networks very lucrative for their abundant use in near future. However, many issues are yet to be solved before their full-scale practical implementations. Among all the research issues in WSN, security is one of the most challenging topics to deal with. The major hurdle of securing a WSN is imposed by the limited resources of the sensors participating in the network. Again, the reliance on wireless communication technology opens the door for various types of security threats and attacks. Considering the special features of this type of network, in this chapter we address the critical security issues in wireless sensor networks. We talk about cryptography, steganography, and other basics of network security and their applicability in WSN. We explore various types of threats and attacks against wireless sensor networks, possible countermeasures, mentionable works done so far, other research issues, etc. We also introduce the view of holistic security and future trends towards research in wireless sensor network security

Detecting wormhole and Byzantine attacks in mobile ad hoc networks

The recent advancements in the wireless technology and their wide-spread utilization have made tremendous enhancements in productivity in the corporate and industrial sectors. However, these recent progresses have also introduced new security vulnerabilities. Since the wireless shared medium is completely exposed to outsiders, it is susceptible to attacks that could target any of the OSI layers in the network stack. For example, jamming of the physical layer, disruption of the medium access control (MAC) layer coordination packets, attacks against the routing infrastructure, targeted attacks on the transport protocol, or even attacks intended to disrupt specific applications. Unfortunately, the effects of applying the security techniques used in wired networks, such as access control and authentication, to wireless and mobile networks have been unsatisfactory due the unique features of such networks. As a result, achieving security goals for mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) has gained significant attention in recent years. Many critical applications of MANET, such as emergency rescue operations, military tactical communication, and business operations like mining and oil drilling platforms, require a friendly and cooperative environment.The aim of this study is to design detection mechanisms for traditional wormhole and Byzantine wormhole attacks by using the topological comparison and round trip time (RTT) measurements. The first step for detecting traditional wormhole attack is that an initiator of the detection process populates its one-hop neighbor list, and also calculates the average round trip time (RTTavg). Meanwhile, a list of suspected neighbors is generated on the basis of RTTavg and RTT. Then, topological information is exchanged between the initiator and all the suspected neighbors to detect the presence of a wormhole link.In this thesis, we also focus on detecting Byzantine wormhole attack in MANET. In the case of detecting such attacks, the initiator creates its one hop neighbor list and calculates the average RTTavg. The initiator also generates a suspected list of its three hop neighbors. In the next phase, the initiator exchanges topological information with all the one hop neighbors to detect the presence of any Byzantine wormhole tunnel. One of the major concerns for the topological comparison based approach is to give the initially suspected nodes a second chance to prove their reliability by exchanging topological information.We have implemented the detection algorithms in ad hoc on demand distance vector (AODV) and optimized link state routing (OLSR) routing protocols. Then, performance evaluation of the proposed detection mechanisms is conducted. We also compared our proposed detection methods with some of the existing detection methods by simulation. The results show that our schemes can achieve better detection performance