Impact Study and Analysis of Hidden-mode of Wormhole Attack in Opportunistic Mobile Networks

The hidden-mode of wormhole attack is launched by malicious nodes that compromise different locations in Opportunistic Mobile Networks (OMNs). These locations, which are referred by wormhole areas, are connected via external links that are hidden from the network. The wormhole attacker uses these links to fool the neighboring nodes by yielding high packet delivery ratio and to route the packets among the legitimate nodes. As the packets reach the wormhole areas, the malicious attacker can launch severe attacks such as packet modification, traffic analysis, and/or packet dropping attacks. This paper addresses the following research questions: (1) What is the impact of wormhole attack in OMNs, (2) Which attack parameter (i.e., wormhole area, attack frequency, and attack duration) is more influential, (3) How different characteristics of OMNs like node density impact the gain of the attacker, and (4) By how much. These questions were examined on four widely-used routing protocols in OMNs, namely, Prophet, SnW, Epidemic, and First Contact. The paper presents extensive simulation experiments and analyzes the results in terms of the most vulnerable routing protocol and the most effective attack parameter.