Research On The Wormhole Attack Detection In Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are increasingly applied to environmental monitoring, public health, military and other fields. At the same time, research on the Internet of Things is also in full swing. Naturally, security problems of WSN are gathering more and more attention. The network is self-organized, and usually deployed under threatening environment, so its safety can’t be guaranteed. And limited resource of nodes determines that the ready secure technology of network couldn’t be directly used in WSN. Security problem of WSN is an urgent issue.Wormhole attack is an important attack in wireless networks which is easy to deploy but hard to detect. It doesn’t need to crack encryption or capture node. There are some problems in existing algorithms. For example, some need extra hardware like directional antenna, GPS and so on. And result of detection is not good enough, or computation complexity is high. Aim to this problem, a new algorithm based on some new phenomenon of WSN under wormhole attack is proposed in this thesis.To research the problem, conception of wormhole attack is abstracted, and concept of pseudo link is proposed to further describe damages of wormhole attack to network. Based on researching on summarizing existing research, a new detection algorithm named SMRSA is proposed in this paper. There are some new appearances like some routing path may be shorter because of tunnel of wormhole attack, and the neighbor number of infected node which is influenced by malicious node is abnormal big. Based on these, this paper raises the algorithm named SMRSA. It includes two steps. Firstly, some source and destination (SD) node pairs are deployed at the edge zone, then they raise the route finding process to find dubious route which has abnormal few hops. Secondly, each node on the dubious route checks their neighbor number to decide whether they are infected or not. If one node’s neighbor number is abnormal big, the node is infected and there is wormhole attack in WSN. When the node finds that it is infected, it isolates itself from the network to avoid more damage. In this paper a new evaluation metric named the proportion of reducing pseudo links which describes reducing extent of the hazard level by the detect algorithm is proposed in addition to false positives, false negatives and accuracy.In this paper we use OMNeT++4.0to simulate the algorithm. Firstly, the wormhole attack was launched in different forms and the detection algorithm was run under two different topologies to test the effect of the algorithm. Then evaluate the effectiveness from four different aspects, and the results show the algorithm works well. Under the same conditions, the algorithm was compared with another existing excellent detection scheme called WAPN and the simulation results show that SMRSA works better than WAPN in the aspect of false positive and accuracy.