Robust and scalable secure neighbor discovery for wireless ad hoc networks

Several important network functionalities such as routing and localization rely on correct neighbor discovery. In wormhole attacks the adversary tunnels the packets from one to another area to mislead the nodes in those typically far away areas to believe to be neighbors. In this paper we propose Robust Secure Neighbor Discovery (RSND) which is a distributed neighbor discovery protocol to prevent such attacks. RSND leverages a combination of Multi-Dimensional Scaling and a loss function used in robust estimations to distinguish a node´s real neighbors from the ones induced by a wormhole. RSND constructs an estimate of the local topology using the measured distances between neighboring nodes such that the effect of wrong ranging values is down-weighted. This allows a node to distinguish which neighbors of it are introduced by a wormhole. We will verify the performance of our protocol using simulation study.