Detection of Hidden Wormhole Attack in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Neighbourhood and Connectivity Information

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have inspired many applications such as military applications, environmental monitoring and other fields. WSN has emergence in various fields, so security is very important issue for sensor networks. Security comes from attacks. Due to the wireless and distributed nature anyone can connect with the network. Among all possible attacks, wormholes are very hard to detect because they can cause damage to the network without knowing the protocols used in the network. It is a powerful attack that can be conducted without requiring any cryptographic breaks. Wormholes are hard to detect because they use a private, out-of-band channel invisible to the underlying sensor network. In this paper a wormhole detection protocol is proposed that is based on neighbourhood and connectivity information. Performance analysis shows that the proposed approach can effectively detect wormhole attack with less storage cost. KEYWORDS Wireless sensor network, wormhole, out-of-band, security, neighbourhood.