Real-time and passive wormhole detection for wireless sensor networks

Wormhole attack is one of the severe threats to wireless sensor and ad hoc networks. Most of the existing countermeasures either require specialized hardware or demand high network overheads in order to capture the specific symptoms induced by the wormholes, which in result, limits their applicability. In this paper, we exploit an inevitable symptom of wormholes and present Pworm, a passive wormhole detection and localization system based upon the key observation that a large amount of network traffic will be attracted by the wormholes. The proposed passive and real-time scheme silently observes the variations in network topology to infer the wormhole existence. Our approach relies solely on network routing information and does not necessitate specialized hardware or poses rigorous assumptions on network features. We evaluate our system performance through extensive simulations of 100 to 500 nodes for various network scales and show that Pworm is well suited for false alarms, scalability and time delay.