Title: DelPHIX: A Simple and Efficient
Mechanism for Wormhole Detection in Ad Hoc Networks
Authors: Hon Sun Chiu, King Shan Lui
Abstract: Data transmission in a mobile ad hoc network is
performed within an untrusted wireless environment. It is subjected to many
kinds of security attacks. In a wormhole attack, two malicious nodes work
together to tunnel packets from one to the other, making other nodes perceive a
path to have a smaller hop count. We identify two types of wormhole attacks. In
the first type, malicious nodes do not expose themselves in route finding
process and legitimate nodes do not know their existence. In the second type,
malicious nodes do create route advertisements and legitimate nodes are aware of
the existence of malicious nodes, just do not know they are malicious. Existing
solutions usually can identify only one kind of attacks. In this paper, we
propose a simple and efficient detection method called DelPHIX. By observing the
delays of different paths to the receiver, the sender is able to detect both
kinds of wormhole attacks. This method requires neither synchronized clocks nor
special hardware equipped mobile nodes. The performance of DelPHIX is justified
by simulations.