Technical Report a Robust Approach towards Secure Neighbor Discovery for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Secure neighbor discovery is an important element in wireless networking. Several important network functionalities such as routing and localization basically rely on correct neighbor discovery which is the problem concerned in this work. A wormhole attacker can easily tunnel and replay packets from one area of the wireless network to another one, to make the nodes in such typically far awar areas to believe to be neighbors, even if every messages are perfectly encrypted. In this paper we propose Robust Secure Neighbor Discovery (RSND) protocol to prevent such attacks in neighbor discovery phase. RSND is a distributed protocol which is able to localize the wormhole affected links among a node’s links to its neighbors. We use MDS in combination with robust statistics to provide robustness in neighbor discovery phase at a node. Keywords-Neighbor discovery; Security; Multi-dimensional scaling; Robust statistics; Ad hoc networks;