DelPHIX: A Simple and Efficient Mechanism for Wormhole Detection in Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Data transmission in a mobile ad hoc network is performed within an untrusted wireless environment. It is subjected to many kinds of security attacks. In a wormhole attack, two malicious nodes work together to tunnel packets from one to the other, making other nodes perceive a path to have a smaller hop count. We identify two types of wormhole attacks. In the first type, malicious nodes do not expose themselves in route finding process and legitimate nodes do not know their existence. In the second type, malicious nodes do create route advertisements and legitimate nodes are aware of the existence of malicious nodes, just do not know they are malicious. Existing solutions usually can identify only one kind of attacks. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient detection method called DelPHIX. By observing the delays of different paths to the receiver, the sender is able to detect both kinds of wormhole attacks. This method requires neither synchronized clocks nor special hardware to be equipped in mobile nodes. The performance of DelPHIX is justified by simulations.

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