A ranging based scheme for detecting the wormhole attack in wireless sensor networks

Abstract Wireless sensor networks have been widely used in general and military scenarios. And this leads to a need for more security. Wireless sensor network are easy vulnerable to attack and compromise. Wormhole attack is a harmful against routing protocol which can drop data randomly or disturbing routing path. In this paper, we proposed a novel method to detect the wormhole attack based on statistical analysis. In the proposed method, a sensor can detect the fake neighbors which are caused by wormhole through the neighbor discovery process, and then a k-means clustering based method is used to detect wormhole attack according to the neighbor information. That is, by using this proposed method, we can detect the wormhole only by the neighbor information without any special requirement. We did some experiments to evaluate the performance of this method, and the experimental results show that our method can achieve satisfying results.