Identifying Time Measurement Tampering in the Traversal Time and Hop Count Analysis (TTHCA) Wormhole Detection Algorithm

• Main Authors: Jonny Karlsson, Laurence S. Dooley, Göran Pulkkis
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2013-05-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: mobile networks; MANET; MANET security; routing security; wormhole attack; hop count; queuing delay; packet processing time; TTHCA; MHA
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/13/5/6651

Traversal time and hop count analysis (TTHCA) is a recent wormhole detection algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) which provides enhanced detection performance against all wormhole attack variants and network types. TTHCA involves each node measuring the processing time of routing packets during the route discovery process and then delivering the measurements to the source node. In a participation mode (PM) wormhole where malicious nodes appear in the routing tables as legitimate nodes, the time measurements can potentially be altered so preventing TTHCA from successfully detecting the wormhole. This paper analyses the prevailing conditions for time tampering attacks to succeed for PM wormholes, before introducing an extension to the TTHCA detection algorithm called ∆T Vector which is designed to identify time tampering, while preserving low false positive rates. Simulation results confirm that the ∆T Vector extension is able to effectively detect time tampering attacks, thereby providing an important security enhancement to the TTHCA algorithm.