A wormhole attack detection method for tactical wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are networks formed by organizing and combining tens of thousands of sensor nodes freely through wireless communication technology. WSNs are commonly affected by various attacks, such as identity theft, black holes, wormholes, protocol spoofing, etc. As one of the more severe threats, wormholes create passive attacks that are hard to detect and eliminate. Since WSN is often used in the tactical network field, a planned secure network is essential for military applications with high security. Guard nodes are traffic monitoring nodes used to supervise neighbors’ data communication around the tactical networks. Therefore, this work proposes a Quality of Service (QoS) security mechanism to select multiple dual-layer guard nodes at different paths of the WSN based on the path qualities to detect wormholes. The entire network’s links are categorized into high, normal, and low priority levels. As such, this study aimed to confirm the security of high priority nodes and links in the tactical network, avoid excessive overhead, and provide random security facilities to all nodes. The proposed measures of the QoS-based security provision, including link cluster formation, guard node selection, authenticated guard node identification, and intrusion detection, ensure economic and efficient network communication with different quality levels.