A Wormhole Attack in Mobile Ad-hoc Network: Detection and Prevention

In Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a self-organizing session of communication between wireless mobile nodes build up dynamically regardless of any established infrastructure or central authority. In MANET each node behaves as a sender, receiver and router which are connected directly with one another if they are within the range of communication or else will depend on intermediate node if nodes are not in the vicinity of each other (hop-to-hop). MANET, by nature are very open, dynamic and distributed which make it more vulnerable to various attacks such as sinkhole, jamming, selective forwarding, wormhole, Sybil attack etc. thus acute security problems are faced more related to rigid network. A Wormhole attack is peculiar breed of attack, which cause a consequential breakdown in communication by impersonating legitimate nodes by malicious nodes across a wireless network. This attack can even collapse entire routing system of MANET by specifically targeting route establishment process. Confidentiality and Authenticity are arbitrated as any cryptographic primitives are not required to launch the attack. Emphasizing on wormhole attack attributes and their defending mechanisms for detection and prevention are discussed in this paper.