Securing AODV Routing Protocol Against Wormhole Attack In Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The wormhole is a severe attack that targets the operation of routing protocols in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). The popular AODV protocol is also vulnerable to this attack. Several routing protocols have been developed to secure AODV and have shown a great impact to the security of AODV offering authenticity, integrity and non repudiation but failed to protect the network against the wormhole attack. Different techniques have been proposed to secure against wormhole attacks but many rely on the use of geographic devices (GPS, antenna) or time synchronized clock. Techniques that don't need them are in some cases inefficient.Therefore, this thesis aims to secure AODV routing with a more efficient mechanism that detects and prevents wormhole attacks in MANETs without the use of any positioning device or time synchronization. The paper main work is to (1) design an AODV-based routing protocol that provides defense against wormhole attacks; and (2) evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol.We propose a routing protocol called "Wormhole Defense Mechanism (WDM)" which is an extension to the AODV routing protocol. In WDM the wormhole attack is identified based on the fact that transmission time between two fake neighbors created by wormhole is considerably higher than that between two real neighbors which are within radio range of each other. A prevention mechanism helps to remove fake neighbors of a node from next route discoveries. Both exposed and hidden wormholes, in-band and out-of-band wormholes are detected and prevented before they do any harm to the network because they are detected during the route setup.The simulations results show that WDM is reliable, outperforms AODV in terms of packets deliver and the number of packets sent through the wormhole reduces considerably when WDM is deployed. Furthermore an analysis of routing overhead shows that WDM requires not too much memory and bandwidth overhead.