LDAC: A localized and decentralized algorithm for efficiently countering wormholes in mobile wireless networks

•We consider the case of wormholes in which an adversary uses secret links to establish false neighbor relationships between distant nodes.•LDAC is localized and works by looking for simple evidence that no attack is taking place, using only connectivity information.•Our approach also accounts for mobile wireless networks with dynamic links and high degree of association and de-association between the nodes.•LDAC always prevents the establishment of wormholes, while simulations show that the rate of false positives is kept very small.•It is very easy to be implemented in practice, even in resource constrained devices such as sensor nodes.

Several protocols have been proposed to date to defend against wormhole attacks in wireless networks by adopting synchronized clocks, positioning devices, or directional antennas. These requirements and assumptions limit their applicability especially in the case of mobile networks where the degree of association and de-association between the nodes is relatively high. In this work, we present a novel lightweight countermeasure for the wormhole attack, called LDAC (Localized-Decentralized Algorithm for Countering wormholes). It is completely localized and works by looking for simple evidence that no attack is taking place, using only connectivity information, as implied by the underlying communication graph. LDAC is not confined to static networks but extends naturally to dynamic and even mobile ones. Rigorous arguments that prove the correctness of the algorithm are coupled with detailed performance evaluation along with an implementation on real sensor devices that demonstrates its efficiency in terms of memory requirements and processing overhead.