Secure Neighbor Discovery in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Range-Free Localization Techniques

If a wireless sensor network (WSN) is deployed in a hostile environment, the intrinsic limitations of the nodes lead to many security issues. In this paper, we address a particular attack to the location and neighbor discovery protocols, carried out by two colluding nodes that set a wormhole to try to deceive an isolated remote WSN node into believing that it is a neighbor of a set of local nodes. To counteract such threat, we present a framework generically called detection of wormhole attacks using range-free methods (DWARF) under which we derive two specific wormhole detection schemes: the first approach, DWARFLoc, performs jointly the detection and localization procedures employing range-free techniques, while the other, DWARFTest, uses a range-free method to check the validity of the estimated position of a node once the location discovery protocol is finished. Simulations show that both strategies are effective in detecting wormhole attacks, and their performances are compared with that of a conventional likelihood ratio test (LRT).