A Secure Localization Approach against Wormhole Attacks Using Distance Consistency

Wormhole attacks can negatively affect the localization in wireless sensor networks. A typical wormhole attack can be launched by two colluding attackers, one of which sniffs packets at one point in the network and tunnels them through a wired or wireless link to another point, and the other relays them within its vicinity. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the wormhole attack on the localization and propose a novel distance-consistency-based secure localization scheme against wormhole attacks, which includes three phases of wormhole attack detection, valid locators identification and self-localization. The theoretical model is further formulated to analyze the proposed secure localization scheme. The simulation results validate the theoretical results and also demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.