LITE WORP: A lightweight countermeasure for the wormhole attack in multihop wireless networks

In multihop wireless systems, such as ad-hoc and sensor networks, the need for cooperation among nodes to relay each other's packets exposes them to a wide range of security attacks. A particularly devastating attack is known as the wormhole attack, where a malicious node records control and data traffic at one location and tunnels it to a colluding node, which replays it locally. This can have an adverse effect in route establishment by preventing nodes from discovering routes that are more than two hops away. In this paper, we present a lightweight countermeasure for the wormhole attack, called LITEWORP, which does not require specialized hardware. LITEWORP is particularly suitable for resource-constrained multihop wireless networks, such as sensor networks. Our solution allows detection of the wormhole, followed by isolation of the malicious nodes. Simulation results show that every wormhole is detected and isolated within a very short period of time over a large range of scenarios. The results also show that the fraction of packets lost due to the wormhole when LITEWORP is applied is negligible compared to the loss encountered when the method is not applied.