Detecting wormhole attacks in delay-tolerant networks [Security and Privacy in Emerging Wireless Networks]

Delay-tolerant networks are especially useful in providing mission-critical services including emergency scenarios and battlefield applications. However, DTNs are vulnerable to wormhole attacks, in which a malicious node records the packets at one location and tunnels them to another colluding node, which relays them locally into the network. Wormhole attacks are a severe threat to normal network operation in DTNs. In this article we describe various methods that have been developed to detect wormhole attacks. However, most of them cannot work efficiently in DTNs. To detect the presence of a wormhole attack, we propose a detection mechanism that exploits the existence of a forbidden topology in the network. We evaluated our approach through extensive simulations using both Random Way Point and Zebranet mobility models. Our results show that the proposed method can detect wormhole attacks efficiently and effectively in DTNs.