Secure neighbor discovery and wormhole localization in mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Neighbor discovery is an important part of many protocols for wireless adhoc networks, including localization and routing. When neighbor discovery fails, communications and protocols performance deteriorate. In networks affected by relay attacks, also known as wormholes, the failure may be more subtle. The wormhole may selectively deny or degrade communications. In this article we present Mobile Secure Neighbor Discovery (MSND), which offers a measure of protection against wormholes by allowing participating mobile nodes to securely determine if they are neighbors, and a wormhole localization protocol, which allows nodes that detected the presence of a wormhole to determine wormhole’s location. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to secure neighbor discovery in mobile adhoc networks and to localize a wormhole. MSND leverages concepts of graph rigidity for wormhole detection. We prove security properties of our protocols, and demonstrate their effectiveness through extensive simulations and a real system evaluation employing Epic motes and iRobot robots.