Multi-Step Detection of Simplex and Duplex Wormhole Attacks over Wireless Sensor Networks

Detection of the wormhole attacks is a cumbersome process, particularly simplex and duplex over the wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Wormhole attacks are characterized as distributed passive attacks that can destabilize or disable WSNs. The distributed passive nature of these attacks makes them enormously challenging to detect. The main objective is to find all the possible ways in which how the wireless sensor network’s broadcasting character and transmission medium allows the attacker to interrupt network within the distributed environment. And further to detect the serious routing-disruption attack “Wormhole Attack” step by step through the different network mechanisms. In this paper, a new multi-step detection (MSD) scheme is introduced that can effectively detect the wormhole attacks for WSN. The MSD consists of three algorithms to detect and prevent the simplex and duplex wormhole attacks. Furthermore, the proposed scheme integrated five detection modules to systematically detect, recover, and isolate wormhole attacks. Simulation results conducted in OMNET++ show that the proposed MSD has lower false detection and false toleration rates. Besides, MSD can effectively detect wormhole attacks in a completely distributed network environment, as suggested by the simulation results.