SECUND: A protocol for SECUre neighborhooD creation in wireless ad hoc networks

The ability to correctly determine their neighborhood is a fundamental requirement for nodes in ad hoc and sensor networks. Many applications, protocols, and system functionality rely on neighborhood discovery. Malicious nodes that taint neighborhood information using wormholes can significantly disrupt the operation of ad hoc networks. Protocols that depend only on cryptographic techniques (e.g, authentication and encryption) may not be able to detect or prevent such attacks. In this paper we propose SECUND, a protocol for creating a SECUre NeighborhooD, that makes use of discrepancies in routing hop count information to detect "true" neighbors and remove those links to nodes that appear to be neighbors, but are really not neighbors. SECUND is simple, localized and needs no special hardware, localization, or synchronization. We present approaches to improve the efficiency of the process. We evaluate SECUND using simulations and we demonstrate its effectiveness in the presence of multiple and multi-ended wormholes.