A Full Image of the Wormhole Attacks - Towards Introducing Complex Wormhole Attacks in wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we are concerned of a particularly severe security attack that affects the ad hoc networks routing protocols, it is called the wormhole attack. We can think of wormhole attack as a two phase process launched by one or several malicious nodes. In the first phase, these malicious nodes, called wormhole nodes, try to lure legitimate nodes to send data to other nodes via them. In the second phase, wormhole nodes could exploit the data in variety of ways. We will introduce the wormhole attack modes and classes, and point to its impact and threat on ad hoc networks. We also analyze the wormhole attack modes from an attacker’s perspective and suggest new improvements to this type of attacks. We finally summarize and conclude this paper. Keywords-attacks; ad hoc network; security; tunneling;