Defending Wormhole Attacks in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks: An Efficient Routing Mechanism with Hop Count Analysis

• Main Authors: Shang-Ming Jen, 任上鳴
• Other Authors: Chi-Sung Laih
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/53415195476120803432

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 電腦與通信工程研究所 === 95 === The wireless ad-hoc network is a kind of newly risen network system. With the ability of self-organization, nodes in the network can automatically form a communication system without infrastructure. However, there are serious security issues in this kind of network due to its wireless transmissions. For example, eavesdrop, modification and Denial of Service (DoS), and so on, are some common attacks. The attackers usually have to use some angles to take the right of routing in order to launch these attacks. The wormhole attack is an effective angle. The routes which go through a wormhole tunnel formed by attackers may have better transmission parameters than normal ones, so that malicious nodes can easily have the right of routing. Until now, many researches against this problem have been proposed. For examples, Wang et al. constructed a visualization system; Hu et al. presented a method of packet leashes; and Lazos et al. gave a graph theory approach, etc. Most of these works detect wormhole from the viewpoint of administrators. Some special hardware or enormous computations are needed for finding the wormhole in most of these methods. Besides, they usually depend on some impractical assumptions of network environment. In this paper, we propose an efficient mechanism, the HCA routing protocol, from users’ viewpoint to avoid some routes which are obviously unsafe. We analyze the hop count values in the route reply (RREP) packets and do not have to confirm the existence of the wormhole. We verify the performance through three experiments and conclude that we can successfully avoid most of the wormhole without any hardware supported. In addition, our HCA protocol does not need any environment assumptions and can be directly adapted in the mobile ad-hoc networks.