Mobile sink using multiple channels to defend against wormhole attacks in wireless sensor networks

Security is a necessity for many sensor-network applications. A particularly harmful attack against sensor networks is known as the wormhole attack, where an adversary tunnels the messages received in one part of the network over a low-latency link and replays them in a different part of the same network. This article presents the threat posed by wormhole attacks to wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks. A novel technique that involves leveraging channel diversity for defense against the wormhole attack has been proposed. Through quantitative analyses, it is shown that even when 50% of a sensor node's neighbors are malicious devices, the provision of one extra available channel for communication with the mobile sink reduces the probability of a wormhole attack to almost zero.