JITWORM: Jitter monitoring based wormhole attack detection in MANET

Abstract

Due to the decentralized nature of Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET), it is exposed to many attacks. One such attack is a wormhole attack which is formed by connecting two or more malicious nodes at distant locations. Existing literature assumes that, if a wormhole tunnel is created it would always have a higher delay than the average per hop delay. Further, it is assumed that a wormhole does not have variable delay. This assumption would not hold in case of newer routing protocols such as Lightweight On-demand Ad-hoc Distance-vector Routing Protocol–Next Generation (LOADng). We propose an algorithm JITWORM, which can detect wormholes with variable delay. We detect the wormhole attack during route discovery phase and data transmission phase. JITWORM detects wormholes by employing a mechanism of analyzing the jitter applied to packets by the nodes. Each node monitors the jitter applied to packets by its neighboring nodes. If the percentage of packets to which jitter is not applied is greater than a set threshold then a wormhole is assumed to be present. After successful detection of a wormhole, it can be isolated from the network. We compare our work with the existing techniques and show that in case of LOADng routing protocol the existing techniques would fail to detect wormholes. Our simulation results and analysis shows that JITWORM is successfully able to detect a wormhole even in presence of variable delay.