Title: Visualisation of wormholes in underwater sensor networks: a distributed approach

Authors: Weichao Wang, Jiejun Kong, Bharat Bhargava, Mario Gerla

Addresses: Department of Software and Information Systems, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC 28223, USA. ' Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. ' Department of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, W. Lafayette, IN 47907, USA. ' Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA

Abstract: We propose a distributed mechanism, Dis-VoW, to detect wormhole attacks in underwater sensor networks. In Dis-VoW, every sensor reconstructs local network layout using multi-dimensional scaling. It detects the wormholes by visualising the distortions in edge lengths and angles among neighbouring sensors. The contributions include: Dis-VoW does not depend on any special hardware; it provides a localised wormhole detection mechanism adapting to network topology changes; it integrates techniques from social science and scientific visualisation to attack network security problems. The simulation results show that Dis-VoW can detect most of the fake neighbour connections without introducing many false alarms.

Keywords: wormhole attacks; underwater sensor networks; localised reconstruction; distributed detection; visualisation; wormholes; network security; simulation; fake neighbour connections.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2008.016198

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2008 Vol.3 No.1, pp.10 - 23

Published online: 09 Dec 2007 *

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