An end-to-end detection of wormhole attack in wireless ad-hoc networks

Wormhole attack is a severe attack in wireless ad-hoc networks. Most of the previous work eliminate the effect of wormhole attack by examining the distance or communication time over each link during the route establishment, which requires special hardware or causes overhead on all links even though only one link on each route could be affected by a wormhole attack. In this article, we propose an end-to-end detection of wormhole attack (EDWA) in wireless ad-hoc networks. We first present the wormhole detection which is based on the smallest hop count estimation between source and destination. If the hop count of a received shortest route is much smaller than the estimated value an alert of wormhole attack is raised at the source node. Then the source node will start a wormhole TRACING procedure to identify the two end points of the wormhole. Finally, a legitimate route is selected for data communication. Both our analysis and simulation results show that the end-to-end wormhole detection method is effective when the source and destination are not too far away.