A New Statistical Method for Wormhole Attack Detection in MANETs

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are a set of mobile wireless nodes that can communicate without the need for an infrastructure. Features of MANETs have made them vulnerable to many security attacks including wormhole attack. In the past few years, different methods have been introduced for detecting, mitigating, and preventing wormhole attacks in MANETs. In this paper, we introduce a new decentralized scheme based on statistical metrics for detecting wormholes that employs “number of new neighbors” along with “number of neighbors” for each node as its parameters. The proposed scheme has considerably low detection delay and does not create any traffic overhead for routing protocols which include neighbor discovery mechanism. Also, it possesses reasonable processing power and memory usage. Our simulation results using NS9 simulator show that the proposed scheme performs well in terms of detection accuracy, false positive rate and mean detection delay.