Boomerang Packet Testing to Mitigate Wormhole Attack in MANET

Abstract

MANET is an infrastructure-less wireless technology used in various critical infrastructure areas such as the military environment, disaster management, etc. MANET is also subject to various security breaches. One such attack is the wormhole attack. Wormhole attackers can unleash a great deal of damage like dropping data packets, manipulating data, disrupting routing, etc. In this paper, we have proposed a novel wormhole mitigation security framework. Our security framework utilizes the attack model to detect an active wormhole attack in MANET. The crux of our framework is that an admin node is chosen from a list of trustable nodes. The admin node periodically relays a boomerang packet across the network. The boomerang packet is the packet destined to return to the admin node itself. Based on the state of the boomerang packet, when it returns admin decides if the packet has been subject to a wormhole attack. If it is subject to a wormhole attack, preventive measures are taken to mitigate the attack. We conducted exhaustive experiments in the NS-3.26 simulator and compared the results with state-of-the-art solutions. Our strategy was able to detect the wormhole nodes at an accuracy of 97%. The packet loss rate was also less when compared to other state-of-the-art solutions during the wormhole attack. This was because of the early and accurate detection of the wormhole attack in MANET.