Conflicting-set-based wormhole attack resistant localization in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The wormhole attack sniffs packets in one point in the network, tunnels them through a wired or wireless link to another point to cause severe influence on the localization process or routing process in the network. In this paper, we analyze the impact of the wormhole attack on the localization in wireless sensor networks and we propose a wormhole attack resistant secure localization scheme. The main idea of our proposed scheme is to build a so-called conflicting set for each locator based on the abnormalities of message exchanges among neighboring locators, and then to identify all dubious locators which are filtered out during localization. Our proposed scheme can identify the dubious locators with a very high probability to achieve secure localization. The simulation results show that it outperforms the existed schemes under different network parameters. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.