Detection of wormhole attacks on IPv6 mobility-based wireless sensor network

New communication networks are composed of multiple heterogeneous types of networks including Internet, mobile networks, and sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks have been applied to various businesses and industries since the last decade. Most sensors have the ability of communication and the requirement of low power consumption. 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks) plays an important role in this convergence of heterogeneous technologies, which allows sensors to transmit information using IPv6 stack. Sensors perform critical tasks and become targets of attacks. Wormhole attack is one of the most common attacks to sensor networks, threatening the network availability by dropping data or disturbing routing paths. RPL (IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks) is a standard routing protocol commonly used in sensor networks. This study proposes a RPL-based wormhole detection mechanism. The rank of a node-defined RPL is adopted to measure the distance. The proposed detection method discovers malicious wormhole nodes if unreasonable rank values are identified. The experimental results show that the proposed detection method can identify wormholes effectively under various wireless sensor networks.