Exposed Mode Wormhole Attack in Opportunistic Mobile Networks: Impact and Analysis Study

What is it about?

Wormhole attack that is carried out with exposed attacker nodes identities is called as exposed mode or wormhole attack, whereas, in hidden mode the attack is carried out by the hidden node identities. The impact study and analysis conducted in this research work focuses on exposed mode. The attack is carried out using pairwise connected attacker nodes that fool the legitimate nodes by using a hidden link to route packets among them (attacker nodes) and yield high packet delivery ratio. This higher packet delivery ratio (PDR) of packets can influence routing decisions in PDR/acknowledgement-based routing protocols. This article studies and analyzes the impact of the exposed-mode of wormhole attack in Opportunistic Mobile Networks (OMNs) on four routing protocols (Prophet, Spray and Wait, First Contact, and Epidemic), using MIT and RWP trace by varying the attacker parameters such as number of attacker pairs, attack frequency, and attack duration. The results were analyzed using two perspectives, i.e., how many extra packets are gained by attacker nodes by influencing the routing decisions? And how much effort attackers have to put while doing the attack to make the attack more or less intense?

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Why is it important?

OMNs are highly vulnerable to security attacks due to random participation of carrier nodes in communication (i.e., ad-hoc nature). Specifically, when the attack is carried out by wormhole nodes that aims to influence the routing protocols that uses (shorter) distance vector, routing costs, and/or hop-counts lists to make packet forwarding decisions. Whenever there is a change in routing paths, hop counts and cost functions vary accordingly. Hence, allowing the wormhole nodes to route the packet/s through their wormhole tunnel(s). Once the packets are directed towards the route formed by the wormhole nodes, they can initiate various attacks such as eavesdropping, packet replay, or packet modification. Moreover, the attackers can launch black-hole (all packets dropping) or grey-hole (selective packet/bit dropping) attacks to compromise the availability of packets.

Perspectives