Defending against worm hole attacks in multicast routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks

Security issues are paramount in wireless networks even more so than in wired networks. A particularly devastating attack in wireless networks is the wormhole attack, where two or more malicious colluding nodes create a higher level virtual tunnel in the network, which is employed to transport packets between the tunnel end points. These tunnels emulate shorter links in the network in which adversary records transmitted packets at one location in the network, tunnels them to another location, and retransmits them into the network. Our focus in this paper is to analyze the performance of reactive multicast routing protocol On Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP) under the influence of worm hole nodes under different scenarios and design a Worm Hole Secure ODMRP (WHS-ODMRP) by applying certificate based authentication mechanism in the route discovery process. The proposed protocol reduces the packet loss due to malicious nodes to a considerable extent thereby enhancing the performance.