A Secure Routing Mechanism against Wormhole Attack in IPv6-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The increasing popularity of wireless sensor networks and IPv6 technology is creating varieties of applications for wireless sensor networks based on IPv6. However, IPv6-based Wireless sensor networks are vulnerable to a harmful attack known as the wormhole attack, where a malicious node overhears data packet at one location and tunnels it to a colluding node, which replays it locally. This can have a negative influence on the routing mechanism by preventing nodes from discovering the normal routes. In this paper, we present a secure routing mechanism against wormhole attack in IPv6-based wireless sensor networks. The design of this routing mechanism can be divided into two phases -- wormhole detection and defense, which is based on the average distance per hop in the network and the TTL of IP header. Besides, our proposal does not require special hardware or high computation and storage capacity of the node, which is quite suitable for the resource-constrained IPv6-based wireless sensor networks. The simulation results show that our proposal is effective under the conditions of different network topology and wormhole parameters.