Wireless sensor network wormhole avoidance using disturbance-based routing schemes

The wormhole attack is an insidious attack on wireless sensor and ad-hoc networks which allows an attacker with only two malicious devices an unprecedented degree of control over network connectivity. It may be implemented without physical compromise of any existing node, and poses problems in terms of reliable detection, as the resulting network properties may be difficult to distinguish from genuine routing improvements via new connectivity. However, as a wormhole attempts to encourage route formation in its vicinity, under network load an active wormhole will generate significant congestion around its endpoints. This paper proposes a novel routing approach which attempts to detect situations which may produce the poor performance characteristic of an ongoing wormhole attack, by making nodes take account of disturbance (the impact of a forwarding commitment on their peers), and diversify routes to attempt to find a wormhole-free path and reduce the influence of the attacker. An example security-sensitive deployment scenario is proposed, and simulation of this scenario is used to evaluate relative performance and energy costs of static and dynamic disturbance-based routing schemes, showing the schemes deliver significant performance improvements over shortest path routing.