Preventing wormhole attacks using physical layer authentication

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are a key enabler of pervasive computing. Constrained resources in mobile stations make it critical for nodes to be able to cooperate to enhance communication and computation capabilities. However, the wireless and dynamic nature of the links presents easy attack vectors for adversaries. The ability to securely discover and identify neighboring nodes (secure ND) is a fundamental building block for such networks. Even a relatively weak adversarial relay has the capability of distorting the network view and diverting significant amount of traffic. This can cause significant performance degradation. In this paper, we utilize the physical layer authentication scheme introduced by Yu, Baras and Sadler [1] to secure neighborhood discovery against adversarial relays. The proposed method incurs little performance overhead and requires no additional hardware. We provide analytical and simulation based performance evaluation of the security of our scheme.