Wormhole attack detection and mitigation model for Internet of Things and WSN using machine learning

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing diverse sectors like business, healthcare, and the military, but its widespread adoption has also led to significant security challenges. IoT networks, in particular, face increasing vulnerabilities due to the rapid proliferation of connected devices within smart infrastructures. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) comprise software, gateways, and small sensors that wirelessly transmit and receive data. WSNs consist of two types of nodes: generic nodes with sensing capabilities and gateway nodes that manage data routing. These sensor nodes operate under constraints of limited battery power, storage capacity, and processing capabilities, exposing them to various threats, including wormhole attacks. This study focuses on detecting wormhole attacks by analyzing the connectivity details of network nodes. Machine learning (ML) techniques are proposed as effective solutions to address these modern challenges in wormhole attack detection within sensor networks. The base station employs two ML models, a support vector machine (SVM) and a deep neural network (DNN), to classify traffic data and identify malicious nodes in the network. The effectiveness of these algorithms is validated using traffic generated by the NS3.37 simulator and tested against real-world scenarios. Evaluation metrics such as average recall, false positive rates, latency, end-to-end delay, response time, throughput, energy consumption, and CPU utilization are used to assess the performance of the proposed models. Results indicate that the proposed model outperforms existing methods in terms of efficacy and efficiency.