Distributed Wormhole Attack Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes a distributed wormhole detection algorithm for wireless sensor networks, a potential technology for infrastructures of many applications. Currently, most sensor networks assume they will be deployed in a benign environment; however, when a sensor network is deployed in some hostile environment, attacks (especially those like wormhole attacks that don’t need to capture the keys used in the network) may affect current sensor networks and may even disable their functions. This paper proposes a distributed wormhole detection algorithm called Wormhole Geographic Distributed Detection (WGDD), that is based on detecting disorder of the networks which is caused by the existence of a wormhole inside the network. Since wormhole attacks are passive, this algorithm uses a hop-counting technique as a probe procedure to detect wormhole attacks, then reconstructs local maps in each node, and after that, uses a feature called “diameter” to detect abnormalities caused by wormholes. The main advantage of using a distributed wormhole detection algorithm is that such an algorithm can provide the approximate location of a wormhole, which may be useful information for further defense mechanisms. Simulations show that the proposed detection method has both a low False Toleration Rate (FTR) and a low False Detection Rate (FDR) in detecting wormhole attacks.