Implementation and Comparison of a New Wormhole Detection Technique with Existing Techniques

Abstract

Mobile Ad hoc networks are increasingly popular these days as they function without major requirements of state of the art infrastructure and the fact that they can function without the need for a central controlling authority. The widespread usage of the MANETs (Mobile Ad hoc networks) also poses some serious problems in them. Because of the high availability of MANETs and improper security measures make the MANETs a ready target for attackers which adopt both active and passive approach to attack the MANET. A classic attack on a MANET is a DOS attack of which wormhole attack is most noteworthy as it is easy to deploy and can cause great damage to the network. In the wormhole attack, an adversary connects two distant points in the network using a direct low-latency communication link in the MANET which is called as wormhole link. Once a wormhole is established, the adversary captures the wireless transmissions on one end and send them through the wormhole link and replays them on the other end. There are many methods available for wormhole detection which include in some cases the use of sophisticated hardware and in other cases makes some modification to the already present information in the MANET. The presence of a wormhole may also be detected in some cases by the use of time delays or geographical locations. A wormhole can be detected when the network has already been set up and wormhole nodes try to penetrate at a later time and secondly when the wormhole nodes were already present in the time of network setup. In this paper, we adopt a new approach which is different from the already existing approaches of wormhole detection. The approach adopted by us has the benefit of saving memory and processing which is an improvement over the other techniques of wormhole detection. It also advocates the use of a modified routing table wherein the routing table will be modified to have an extra consisting of full paths of each node next to the hop. Using this approach of modified routing table, we can identify suspicious links long before the attack takes place and starts disturbing the network. This approach is implemented on various routing protocols with the help of NS3 and a comparative analysis has been made for the same. A comparison of this approach with some other techniques of wormhole detection is also carried out to highlight the effectiveness and efficiency of this approach.