Secure positioning of wireless sensor networks against wormhole attacks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, the location of nodes is closely related to all tasks, so the accuracy and security of node localization are highly required. The core of the DV-HOP algorithm is based on the number of hops between nodes for localization, but wormhole attacks replay information through wormholes, and this attack greatly affects the parameter hop count. To address this security flaw, the DV-HOP algorithm is improved by first detecting the presence of wormhole attacks based on the communication characteristics between nodes, then the affected beacon nodes use a correction formula to fix the incorrect hop count information and transmit the correct information again, and finally the sensor nodes further evaluate and determine the location of the wormhole connection to prevent it in subsequent applications. Through experimental simulations, the proposed method improves the average localization accuracy by about 51.3 and 12.7\(\%\), respectively, compared with the DV-HOP and LBDV algorithms without security improvements, which confirms that the proposed method is robust to wormhole attacks and reduces the localization errors affected by wormhole attacks.