Wormhole attack in mobile ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Wireless networks are playing important role for development and ease of use of human society. It also gets a lot of attention from research community towards the betterment of applications. A wide range of applications make it very popular and backbone of technology system i.e. GSM, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi etc. In order to categorization of applications, this network gives a unique range for monitoring and surveillance. MANETs may be ad-hoc is fixed natured use to deploy into remote areas for sensing and processing desire information. Due to distributed and open natured of wireless networks, it is vulnerable and prone for attacked to intercept and hijack network communication. Its deployment in remote areas requires more concern of security issues. Open natured communication be a magnet for attacker to intercept and catch the sensed information. Numerous security threats can adversely affect its functioning & degrade network performance. The problem becomes more critical when it deploy for defense mission. Arbitrary network failure or node failure is the natural phenomena and may vary as per real life deployment, but intentional failure or compromising network may lead to leak the information. A various security threats like Worm-hole attack, Black-hole Attack, Gray-hole attack, Sybil Attack etc. are used for packet dropping, capturing and degrading network performance. Security in mobile networks is a challenging task. Furthermore, low profile resources and security overhead create cumbersome situation for detection and prevention mechanism. The complete study observes that, security threats not only capture the packets but also degrade network performance. To overcome vulnerability problems, work considers wormhole attack as study target and will derive mechanism to identify and prevent mobile networks from security threat. A wormhole attack is very popular and applies on network layer by targeting vulnerabilities of routing protocols. The complete works consider Ad-hoc On Demand Routing protocol and identify several vulnerabilities.