Secure Neighbor Verification Protocol in Wireless Mesh Networks

The main motivation of an attacker is to convince two far away nodes as neighbor nodes using wormhole attack easily without the knowledge of cryptographic primitives. Thus, it can significantly degrade the performance of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). Secure neighbor discovery is a fundamental requirement of network nodes to ensure secure data communication. An adversary that bypass neighbor discovery process of a legitimate node using wormhole attack can disrupt the overlying protocols and applications. In this paper, we propose a secure neighbor verification mechanism to thwart wormhole attack that can prevent bogus links from being involved in the network operations. It employs node ranking scheme to compute relative distance between neighbors and uses connectivity information to check the genuinity of neighborhood creation. We evaluate our mechanism using simulation to demonstrate the efficiency in the presence of wormholes.