Detection And Prevention Of Wormhole Attack In Wireless Mesh Networks

As the "last mile" access solutions to the Internet, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) can provide a kind of flexible, low-cost and high-speed multihop communication. At present, WMNs has become the main network fusing all kinds of wireless technology, and is widely applied in various kinds of wireless communications. However, WMNs is vulnerable to various kinds of attacks because of the inherent characteristics of the wireless networks, and wormhole attack is a very threatening attack.Wormhole attack is a kind of attack which is harmful to the wireless multihop networks. Wormhole is a high-speed and low-latency channel that is established by two or more attackers to transmit information. In wormhole attack, one attacker transmits the received packets through the wormhole to another attacker which will replay the packets to the network, carrying out attacks to MAC protocol and routing protocol.In the first place, according to the characteristics of wireless mesh networks and the implementation methods of wormhole attacks in wireless multihop networks, this paper analyzes the realization methods of wormhole attacks in wireless mesh networks and the harmfulness of wormhole attacks to WMNs. As the characteristics of wireless mesh routers, the wormhole which is formed by the routers would cause greater damage in the network, and possibly even make various networks not connected to WMNs.Then, this paper puts forward a secure routing protocol SPAMR (Secure Position Aided Mesh Routing) which can prevent and detect wormhole attacks in WMNs. In SPAMR protocol, each node register to obtain certificate from the CA, wireless mesh router's certificate contains its location information. Through calculation of the distance to its neighbor's node, wireless mesh routers establish a one-hop neighbor table and its direct communication client node table. At the same time, it stores two-hop neighbor's identity in the one-hop neighbor's item. Wireless mesh routers only communicate to the nodes in its one-hop neighbor table, and only pass packets for the nodes in its client node table. Therefore, SPAMR can successfully detect wormhole attacks in WMNs.In the last, this paper analyzes and simulates SPAMR protocol. Through the analysis, SPAMR protocol is certified to prevent and detect the wormhole attacks in the network by using CA certification and the two-hop neighbors' information. Thus it could realize secure communication between legitimate nodes very well in WMNs. This thesis simulates SPAMR protocol through Windows XP + OPNET simulation environment. Simulation result shows that SPAMR protocol could effectively reduce the packet loss rate and obtain good wormhole attack detection effect.