Various OSI Layer Attacks and Countermeasure to Enhance the Performance of WSNs during Wormhole Attack

Wireless sensor networks are networks having non wired infrastructure and dynamic topology. In OSI model each layer is prone to various attacks, which halts the performance of a network .In this paper several attacks on four layers of OSI model are discussed and security mechanism is described to prevent attack in network layer i.e wormhole attack. In Wormhole attack two or more malicious nodes makes a covert channel which attracts the traffic towards itself by depicting a low latency link and then start dropping and replaying packets in the multi-path route. This paper proposes promiscuous mode method to detect and isolate the malicious node during wormhole attack by using Ad-hoc on demand distance vector routing protocol (AODV) with omnidirectional antenna. The methodology implemented notifies that the nodes which are not participating in multi-path routing generates an alarm message during delay and then detects and isolate the malicious node from network. We also notice that not only the same kind of attacks but also the same kind of countermeasures can appear in multiple layer. For example, misbehavior detection techniques can be applied to almost all the layers we discussed.