WDP: A wormhole discovery protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks

Malicious nodes in an ad hoc network can launch a wormhole attack by tunneling packets to remote parts of a network and having them retransmitted from there. This attack disseminates a false view of neighbor relations among nodes influencing communicating parties to select routes which include wormholes. Thereafter the malicious nodes may launch other attacks such as dropping and/or tampering with data. Previous attempts to detect wormholes have been based on clock synchronization which due to the decentralized nature of ad hoc networks is impossible to provide without elaborate and expensive hardware. In this paper, we propose a solution to detect wormholes without clock synchronization. It is based on a combination of authentication with location information. We use simulations to show that our protocol fares well even in the presence of a large fraction of malicious nodes.