Secure localization against wormhole attacks using conflicting sets

Abstract

The wormhole attack is a severe attack that can be easily mounted on a wide range of wireless networks without compromising any cryptographic quantity or network node. In the wormhole attack, an attacker sniffs packets at one point in the network, tunnels the packets through a wired or wireless link to another point. Such kind of attack can cause severe problems in wireless sensor networks, especially deteriorate the routing process and the localization process. In this paper, we propose a secure localization scheme against wormhole attacks, which includes three phases: wormhole attack detection, neighboring locators differentiation and secure localization. The main idea of the proposed secure localization scheme is to build a so-called conflicting set for each locator according to the abnormalities of message exchanges among neighboring locators, which is used to differentiate the dubious locators from valid locators for the secure localization. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existed schemes under different network parameters.