Detecting and Mitigating Wormhole Attack Effect in MANETs Based on Hop Count Technique

Wormhole Attack is one of the most serious and the most common security attacks in MANETs. In this research, the effect of Wormhole Attack on network performance, in the presence of one-tunnel then two tunnels, has been studied. A technique based on hop count analysis has been applied to evaluate its effectiveness in detecting the attack and mitigating its effects. Average Throughput, Packet Delivery Ratio and Average End-to-End Delay parameters have been used in performance evaluation. Simulation experiments using NS-2.35 show that the applied technique mitigates the impact of Wormhole Attack. The applied technique gives good results of Average Throughput and Packet Delivery Ratio. These values slightly degrade when number of attacking nodes increases. Average end-to-end delay increases when wormhole attack occurs.