A Wormhole Attack Mitigation Strategy Based on Mobile Agent

摘要

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self-organized, infrastructure less, multi-hop network, which is highly vulnerable to various attacks. Among various attacks, DoS (Denial of Service) attack that may lead to the collapse of the network performs as a disaster in the network. Wormhole attack, a particularly devastating DoS attack, is taken by two or more colluding nodes that create a virtual tunnel to do further malicious actions. The tunnel emulates shorter links in the network and can be employed to transport packets between end points of the tunnel. By using wormhole attack, malicious nodes can not only eavesdrop packet contents but also modify or drop legitimate packets. Wormhole attack is even more harmful than other kinds of DoS attacks for it can be launched even without getting any cryptographic keys or compromising the existing nodes. This paper proposes a mobile agent based strategy to overcome not only the closed wormhole attack but also the half open and open wormhole attack. Both wormhole using encapsulation and wormhole using out-of-band channel are taken into consideration and the proposed method shows a good performance in detecting the malicious nodes.