Effects of Wormhole Attack on Routing Topology

Abstract

The article is devoted to investigating the effects of wormhole attack on routing topology in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Currently, WSNs are increasingly vulnerable to numerous security attacks. One of the major attacks affecting WSNs involves a wormhole attack where attackers receive packets at a single end in the network and tunnel the packets to other points in the network and are subsequently replayed in the network. The wormhole attacks can affect the routing topology by redirecting traffic. Because of the nature of WNSs, attackers can develop a wormhole for packets not destined for them due to overhearing them within the wireless network and tunneling them to colluding attackers on the opposite side of the wormhole. Mainly, wormhole attacks are hazardous to ad-hoc network routing protocols. Therefore, it is evident that routing topology suffers from various vulnerabilities and needs robust security measures. This research investigates the effects of wormhole attacks on routing topology, and a simulation is presented to depict wormhole attack effects. In addition, an analysis of whormhole simulation of packet transmission with and without attacker node using Network Simulator NS-2 environment has been carried out. A simulation conducted using NS2 determined the performance of two reactive routing protocols (AODV and DSR) using their throughput, the first and the last packet received, and the total amount of bytes received in two conditions (with and without wormhole). Findings obtained demonstrate that the performance of DSR was better compared to that of AODV. The introduction of wormhole attacks in both routing protocols significantly affected the performance.