WRSR: Wormhole-resistant secure routing for wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Wormhole attack is one of the most severe security threats in wireless mesh network that can disrupt majority of routing communications, when strategically placed. At the same time, most of the existing wormhole defence mechanisms are not secure against wormhole attacks that are launched in participation mode. In this paper, we propose WRSR, a wormhole-resistant secure routing algorithm that detects the presence of wormhole during route discovery process and quarantines it. Unlike other existing schemes that initiate wormhole detection process after observing packet loss, WRSR identifies route requests traversing a wormhole and prevents such routes from being established. WRSR uses unit disk graph model to determine the necessary and sufficient condition for identifying a wormhole-free path. The most attractive features of the WRSR include its ability to defend against all forms of wormhole (hidden and Byzantine) attacks without relying on any extra hardware like global positioning system, synchronized clocks or timing information, and computational intensive traditional cryptographic mechanisms. © 2013 Matam and Tripathy; licensee Springer.