LITEWORP: Detection and Isolation of the Wormhole Attack in Static 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 far away, which replays it locally. This can either disrupt route establishment or make routes pass through the malicious nodes. This paper presents a lightweight countermeasure for the wormhole attack, called LITEWORP, which relies on overhearing neighbor communication. LITEWORP is particularly suitable for resource-constrained multihop wireless networks, such as sensor networks. This solution allows detection of the wormhole, followed by isolation of the malicious nodes.