Abstract
Several protocols have been proposed to defend against wormholes
in ad hoc networks by adopting positioning devices, synchronized clocks, or directional antennas. In this paper, we propose a mechanism, MDS-VOW, to detect wormholes
in a sensor network. MDS-VOW rst reconstructs the layout of the sensors using multi-dimensional scaling. To compensate the distortions caused by distance measurement errors,
a surface smoothing scheme is adopted. MDS-VOW then detects the wormhole by visualizing the anomalies introduced
by the attack. The anomalies, which are caused by the fake connections through the wormhole, bend the reconstructed surface to pull the sensors that are faraway to each
other. Through detecting the bending feature, the wormhole is located and the fake connections are identified. The contributions of MDS-VOW are: (1) it does not require the sensors to be equipped with special hardware, (2) it adopts and combines the techniques from social science, computer
graphics, and scientific visualization to attack the problem in network security. We examine the accuracy of the proposed mechanism when the sensors are deployed in a circle
area and one wormhole exists in the network. The results show that MDS-VOW has a low false alarm ratio when the
distance measurement errors are not large.