Wormhole Attacks and Countermeasures in Wireless Sensor Networks : A Survey

Wireless sensor networks can be deployed in inhospitable terrains or in hostile environments to provide continuous monitoring and processing capabilities. Due to the wireless and distributed nature, security is very crucial issue in wireless sensor network. Security comes from attacks. Detecting wormhole attack is very hard compared to other attacks because it uses private, out-of-band channel to launch the attack. To launch this type of attack, attacker does not require any cryptographic breaks. Wormhole attack represents one forms of Denial of Service attack. It is a gateway of many more attacks. This paper focuses on the various wormhole detection techniques, the open research areas and future research directions.