Abstract

As mobile ad hoc network applications are deployed, security emerges as a central requirement. In this paper, we introduce the wormhole attack, a severe attack against ad hoc routing protocols that is particularly challenging to defend against. We show how an attacker can use the wormhole attack to cripple a range of ad hoc network routing protocols. In the wormhole attack, an attacker records packets (or bits) at one location in the network, tunnels them to another location, and retransmits them there into the network. Most existing ad hoc network routing protocols, without some mechanism to defend them against the wormhole attack, would be unable to find routes longer than one or two hops, severely disrupting communication.

Citations