Wormhole Attack Detection System for IoT Network: A Hybrid Approach

Many errors in data communication cause security attacks in Internet of Things (IoT). Routing errors at network layer are prominent errors in IoT which degrade the quality of data communication. Many attacks like sinkhole attack, blackhole attack, selective forwarding attack and wormhole attack enter the network through the network layer of the IoT. This paper has an emphasis on the detection of a wormhole attack because it is one of the most uncompromising attacks at the network layer of IoT protocol stack. The wormhole attack is the most disruptive attack out of all the other attacks mentioned above. The wormhole attack inserts information on incorrect routes in the network; it also alters the network information by causing a failure of location-dependent protocols thus defeating the purpose of routing algorithms. This paper covers the design and implementation of an innovative intrusion detection system for the IoT that detects a wormhole attack and the attacker nodes. The presence of a wormhole attack is identified using location information of any node and its neighbor with the help of Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) values and the hop-count. The proposed system is energy efficient hence it is beneficial for a resource-constrained environment of IoT. It also provides precise true-positive (TPR) and false-positive detection rate (FPR).