A Simple and Efficient Mechanism to Detect and Avoid Wormhole Attacks in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc networks are vulnerable to many kinds of attacks since they have unique characteristics like limited bandwidth, limited battery power and dynamic network topology. Among the various attacks possible in mobile ad hoc networks wormhole attack is one which is treated as a very severe attack. In this attack a malicious node records packets at one location in the network and tunnels them to another malicious node which is present in the other end of the network. In this paper, we have proposed an algorithm which detects and avoids the wormhole attack in the routing phase itself. Our mechanism is based on the total round trip time (RTT) of the established route and the average round trip times of the sender one hop neighbors, which is considered as maximum one hop round trip time. Our solution works for both mobile ad hoc networks and wireless ad hoc networks.