Implementation of a wormhole attack on wireless sensor networks with XBee S2C devices

Abstract

One of the most dangerous threats to Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are wormhole attacks due to their capacity to manipulate routing and application data in real time and cause important damages to the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of network data. In this work, an empirical method to launch such attack (which is successful) on IEEE 802.15.4/Zigbee devices with source routing enabled is adopted to find signatures for detecting wormhole attacks in real environments. It uses the KillerBee framework with algorithms for packet manipulation through a malicious node to capture and inject malicious packets in victim nodes. Besides, a reverse variant of wormhole attack is presented and executed. To evidence the realization of this threat by the attacking software, the experimental framework includes XBee S2C nodes. The results include recommendations, detection signatures and future work to face wormhole attacks involving source routing protocols like DSR.