Wormhole attack prevention using clustering and digital signatures in reactive routing

Owing to features of open medium, absence of infrastructure, dynamic network topology, cooperative algorithms, lack of centralized monitoring and resource constraints, ad hoc networks are vulnerable to many kinds of attacks, among which wormhole attack is chosen as the topic of discussion. This attack, when launched during route discovery phase can percolate wrong route/topology information into the network thereby, defeating the purpose of routing algorithms. In this paper we propose a novel technique based on clustering and digital signatures for prevention against wormhole attacks without use of special hardware, time synchronisation or dependency on time or hop difference between colluding nodes to identify attacked routes. We employ independent algorithms to form clusters and to implement intra-cluster and inter-cluster routing of data packets. Simulation Results show that the method achieved high level of efficiency in isolating wormhole nodes in the network.