As nodes' characteristics that they are self-governed and resource-limited, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) face potential threats due to various attacks, among which the most threatening attack is wormhole attack. Wormhole attack severely imperils WSNs and is difficult to be detected, for it causes incorrect routing by private tunnels and damages to WSNs in terms of data leakage, data dropping, and delayed delivery. However, the existing solutions are based on additional hardware, incur high communication overhead, or fail to give consideration to all types of wormholes. In this paper, we propose CREDND, a protocol for creating a Credible Neighbor Discovery against wormholes in WSN, which can detect not only external wormholes through the hop difference between the own exclusive neighbors but also internal wormholes through enabling the common neighbor nodes as witnesses to monitor whether the authentication packets are forwarded by malicious nodes. CREDND is a simple, localized protocol and needs no special hardware, localization, or synchronization, but it improves the ability of wormhole defense. The simulation results are provided, showing that CREDND outperforms in wormhole detection than other same types of solutions. INDEX TERMS Secure neighborhood, neighbor discovery, network security, wireless sensor networks, wormhole attack.
With the quick development of Internet of Things (IoT), one of its important supporting technologies, i.e., wireless sensor networks (WSNs), gets much more attention. Neighbor discovery is an indispensable procedure in WSNs. The existing deterministic neighbor discovery algorithms in WSNs ensure that successful discovery can be obtained within a given period of time, but the average discovery delay is long. It is difficult to meet the need for rapid discovery in mobile low duty cycle environments. In addition, with the rapid development of IoT, the node densities of many WSNs greatly increase. In such scenarios, existing neighbor discovery methods fail to satisfy the requirement in terms of discovery latency under the condition of the same energy consumption. This paper proposes a group-based fast neighbor discovery algorithm (GBFA) to address the issues. By carrying neighbor information in beacon packet, the node knows in advance some potential neighbors. It selects more energy efficient potential neighbors and proactively makes nodes wake up to verify whether these potential neighbors are true neighbors, thereby speeding up neighbor discovery, improving energy utilization efficiency and decreasing network communication load. The evaluation results indicate that, compared with other methods, GBFA decreases the average discovery latency up to 10.58% at the same energy budget.
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