Subhashis Banerjee and Koushik Majumder, West Bengal University of Technology, India

A severe type of network layer security attack called Wormhole attack can occur in MANET, during which a malicious node captures packets from one location in the network, and tunnels them to another colluding malicious node at a distant point, which replays them locally. This paper presents a hierarchical cluster based Wormhole attack avoidance technique to avoid such scenario. The concept of hierarchical clustering with a novel hierarchical 32-bit node addressing scheme is used for avoiding the attacking path during the route discovery phase of the DSR protocol, which is considered as the under lying routing protocol. Pinpointing the location of the Wormhole nodes in the case of exposed attack is also given by using this method.

MANET, Wormhole attack, DSR, Hierarchical clustering, Hierarchical node addressing.