A Trust-Aware Round-Trip-Time and Hop-Count Anomaly Approach for Wormhole Attack Detection in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) route data cooperatively across nodes without any fixed infrastructure, which makes them flexible but also exposes them to attacks that exploit the routing layer directly. The wormhole attack is among the most disruptive of these: two colluding malicious nodes capture control or data packets at one point in the network, tunnel them through an out-of-band or high-speed link, and replay them at a distant point, creating the illusion of a short, attractive route that does not correspond to any real physical path. Because the tunnel can be established without breaking any cryptographic protection and without compromising any legitimate node, wormhole attacks are difficult to detect using authentication alone. This paper proposes a detection approach that combines two independent, lightweight signals — round-trip time (RTT) anomalies observed during route discovery and hop-count deviation relative to a locally estimated node density — with a slowly-decaying per-neighbor trust score, so that a single suspicious observation does not immediately convict a node, but a consistent pattern across multiple route discoveries does. The approach is presented at the design level, with its detection logic, thresholds, and expected trade-offs described in detail; no simulation results are reported here, and the discussion of evaluation is limited to the metrics and experimental design that would be needed to validate it.