FEEPVR: First End-to-End Protocol to Secure Ad Hoc Networks with Variable Ranges against Wormhole Attacks

In this paper, we present a very simple and efficient end-to-end algorithm to handle wormhole attacks on ad hoc networks with variable ranges of communication. Most of the existing approaches focus on the prevention of wormholes between neighbors that trust each other. The known end-to-end mechanisms assume that all the nodes of the network have same communication range. To the best of our knowledge this is the first attempt to handle variable ranges of the nodes in an ad hoc network where only the source and the destination are assumed to trust each other. We provide a lower bound on the minimum number of hops on a good route. Any path showing lesser hop-counts is shown to be under attack. Our algorithm requires every node to know its location. With very accurate GPS available, this assumption is not unreasonable. Since our protocol does not require speed or time, we do not need clock synchronization. In the absence of any error in the location, there are no false alarms i.e. no good paths are discarded. We have shown that the effect of error in the location information is negligible and can be ignored most of the times. The storage and computation overhead is low. For a path of length I, it takes only O(l) space and time.