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Timing-based localization of in-band wormhole tunnels in MANETs

Published: 22 March 2010 Publication History

Abstract

The problem of localizing in-band wormhole tunnels inMANETs is considered. In an in-band wormhole attack, colluding attackers use a covert tunnel to create the illusion that two remote network regions are directly connected. This apparent shortcut in the topology attracts traffic which the attackers can then control.
To identify the nodes participating in the attack, it is necessary to determine the path through which victims' traffic is covertly tunneled. This paper begins with binary hypothesis testing, which tests whether a suspected path is carrying tunneled traffic. The detection algorithm is presented and evaluated using synthetic voice over IP (VoIP) traffic generated in a network testbed. After that, we consider multiple hypothesis testing to find the most likely tunnel path among a large number of candidates. We present a tunnel path estimation algorithm and its numerical evaluation using Poisson traffic. A main feature of the proposed algorithms is their robustness against the presence of chaff packets (possibly introduced to avoid detection), packet loss caused by unreliable wireless links, and clock skew at different nodes.

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Cited By

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  • (2018)Approaches and Measures to Detect Wormhole Attack in Wireless Sensor Networks: A SurveyAdvances in Communication, Devices and Networking10.1007/978-981-10-7901-6_92(855-864)Online publication date: 24-May-2018
  • (2015)Wormhole Attack Detection Algorithms in Wireless Network Coding SystemsIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2014.232457214:3(660-674)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2015

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  1. Timing-based localization of in-band wormhole tunnels in MANETs

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      M.A. Bhagyaveni

      The issue of localizing the in-band tunnels in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is addressed in this paper. It focuses entirely on a timing-based approach-the value of timing in detection is understood, as is the fact that packet headers and other auxiliary information may not be available, due to the encryption of forwarded traffic. Kim et al. present a good literature survey on wormhole attacks. They clearly explain their contributions to identifying the wormhole in the presence of chaff packets, clock skew, and packet loss, which are common characteristics of MANETs. This paper is well written, and has good technical content. Its main contributions are: a method to find chaff-to-traffic ratio (CTR); a method to find minimum CTR; a method to find minimum CTR with clock skew; and tunnel path estimation. The authors' validation testbed and methodology are impressive. Kim et al. do not address the issue of tunnel identification. Hence, the false alarm or missed alarm issues are not dealt with (they are out of the scope of the paper). Online Computing Reviews Service

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      WiSec '10: Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Wireless network security
      March 2010
      186 pages
      ISBN:9781605589237
      DOI:10.1145/1741866
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 22 March 2010

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      Author Tags

      1. in-band wormhole attack
      2. network intrusion detection
      3. timing analysis
      4. wormhole tunnel localization

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      WISEC '10
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      WISEC '10: Third ACM Conference on Wireless Network Security
      March 22 - 24, 2010
      New Jersey, Hoboken, USA

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      View all
      • (2018)Approaches and Measures to Detect Wormhole Attack in Wireless Sensor Networks: A SurveyAdvances in Communication, Devices and Networking10.1007/978-981-10-7901-6_92(855-864)Online publication date: 24-May-2018
      • (2015)Wormhole Attack Detection Algorithms in Wireless Network Coding SystemsIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2014.232457214:3(660-674)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2015

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