Intrusion Detection for Wormhole Attacks in Ad hoc Networks: A Survey and a Proposed Decentralized Scheme

The dynamic and cooperative nature of ad hoc networks presents substantial challenges in securing and detecting attacks in these networks. A particularly severe security attack, called the wormhole attack, has been introduced in the context of ad-hoc networks. During the attack, a malicious node captures packets from one location in the network, and tunnels them to another malicious node at a distant point, which replays them locally. In this paper we survey and classify the solutions that have been proposed in the literature for this attack and propose a decentralized scheme for intrusion detection based on the theory of diffusion of innovations. We argue that the proposed approach is more appropriate to address ad hoc networks´ dynamic and cooperative nature especially at the application level.