Detecting Wormhole Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The development of wireless sensor devices in terms of low power and inexpensive data-relaying has been partially achieved because of the rapid progress in integrated circuits and radio transceiver designs and device technology. Due to these achievements, the wireless sensor devices are able to gather information, process them if required and send them to the next sensor device. The captured information might be regarding temperature, pressure or light, and so on.

In some applications, these wireless sensor devices must be secured, especially when the captured information is valuable, sensitive or for military usage. Wormhole attacks are a significant type of security attacks which can damage the wireless sensor networks if they go undetected. Unfortunately, these attacks are still possible, even if the communication is secured. The wormhole attack records packets at one point of the network, passes them into another node and this last node injects the packet into the wireless sensor network again.

The main objective of this project is to build an actual test bed to simulate the wormhole attack on a wireless sensor network and to implement one of the current solutions which is called packet leashes to protect sensor networks from these kinds of attacks. This project’s test bed consists of a combination of Mica 2 motes and Stargate sensor devices.