Confirmation of wormhole attack in MANETs using honeypot

Abstract

The flexibility and ease of deployment provided by Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) come at the cost of lack of security and vulnerability. Many solutions are proposed to protect MANET from attacks, ranging from attack identification to prevention. Although these solutions reduce the attacks in a MANET, they are likely to identify many false attacks as real ones. Such false alarms occur more often when an attack is complex and have multiple features, for example in a wormhole attack. In this paper we propose a Wormhole Attack Confirmation (WAC) System using honeypot to mitigate false alarms in a MANET and protect its resources. The confirmation of attacks dictates the necessity of analyzing all the possible scenarios of the attack. In order to analyze the wormhole attack we have built a Wormhole Attack Tree based on its symptoms. The honeypot confirms the wormhole attack using the Wormhole Attack Tree (WAT) and history of attacks. We have simulated the proposed system in several MANET environments of varying sizes of nodes and applications. On several occasions the results have demonstrated that the proposed system is efficient in confirming the wormhole attack, thereby saving the resources and minimizing the path re-establishment.