Determining Location of Wormhole Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks using Patrol Nodes

Abstract

One of the dangerous and common attacks against wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is wormhole. In this attack, an adversary established two malicious nodes in two areas of the network environment which are far from each other and creates a particular and high-speed link between these two nodes as wormhole channel. This attack has an adverse effect on routing algorithms. Malicious nodes at both ends of the wormhole channel exchange messages of two areas which are far from each other, as a result of which nodes of these areas considered to be neighbors. In this study, an algorithm is proposed to handle the wormhole attack in WSNs. The main idea of the proposed algorithm is to collect spatial and neighborhood information by mobile patrol nodes in the network environment to detect malicious nodes. In the proposed algorithm, there are a number of patrol nodes whichwalkin the network and gather required information from different points of the network to detect wormhole attack. The proposed algorithm is simulated and its efficiency is evaluated in terms of detection rate and location estimation of malicious nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is able to detect 100% of malicious nodes which is favorable compared to the basic algorithm.