Proposed Methodology for Securing Wireless LANs from Wormhole Attack

Wormhole attacks enable an attacker with limited Resources and no cryptographic material to wreak havoc on wireless networks. Initial research focused that this attack is possible only on Adhoc networks, but in present condition wormhole attack is possible on infrastructure based wireless LANs also. We propose architecture and analyze the possibility of wormhole attack along with a countermeasure to avoid such an attack. The proposed mechanism involves the shared information between communicating Access Points to prevent Rouge Access Points from masquerading as false neighbours. Our defense greatly diminishes the threat of wormhole attacks and requires no location information or clock synchronization.