JamholeHunter: On detecting new wormhole attack in Opportunistic Mobile Networks

This paper first shows that Prophet, Spray and Wait, Epidemic, and First Contact routing protocols in Opportunistic Mobile Networks (OMNs) are vulnerable to the Jamhole attack. In Jamhole attack, an attacker, Eve, compromises two different locations in OMNs by (i) jamming the GPS signal of victim nodes in these locations and (ii) by establishing a pair-wise hidden wormhole tunnel among these locations to route packets and to achieve high packet delivery ratio. The Jamhole attack enables Eve to disrupt the routing, obtain more packets of victim nodes, and possibly launch more severe attacks like packet modification, packet dropping, and packet injection attacks.

In this paper, the impact of Jamhole attack on OMNs routing protocols is investigated using different attack parameters (i.e., area of compromised locations, attack frequency, and attack duration). To identify the Jamhole attack, this paper proposes JamholeHunter, a detection protocol that employs nodes’ wireless ranges, velocities, and last available GPS locations. The paper measured the impact of Jamhole attack and evaluated the JamholeHunter technique through extensive simulation experiments using synthetic and real-world mobility traces. The results demonstrate that (i) the Jamhole attack can cause a serious impact on the OMNs routing protocols, (ii) the effectiveness of JamholeHunter in identifying Jamhole attack with Detection Rate (75% to 100%) depending on various attack parameters with $\sim$95% Accuracy, and low False Positive Rate ($\le$ 3.7%), and (iii) the reliability of JamholeHunter in real-world scenarios of OMNs under different attack parameters, mobility models, and nodes velocity.