2012
Preventing Wormhole Attacks using Physical Layer Authentication
S. Jain and J. S. Baras
Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC 2012), pp. 2739-2744, Paris, France, April 1-4, 2012.
Abstract
Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are a key enabler
of pervasive computing. Constrained resources in mobile
stations make it critical for nodes to be able to cooperate to
enhance communication and computation capabilities. However,
the wireless and dynamic nature of the links presents easy attack
vectors for adversaries. The ability to securely discover and
identify neighboring nodes (secure ND) is a fundamental building
block for such networks. Even a relatively weak adversarial
relay has the capability of distorting the network view and
diverting significant amount of traffic. This can cause significant
performance degradation. In this paper, we utilize the physical
layer authentication scheme introduced by Yu, Baras and Sadler
[1] to secure neighborhood discovery against adversarial relays.
The proposed method incurs little performance overhead and
requires no additional hardware. We provide analytical and
simulation based performance evaluation of the security of our
scheme.