WAND: Wormhole Attack Analysis using the Neighbor Discovery for Software-defined Heterogeneous Internet of Things

Heterogeneous Internet of Things (HIoT) such as a UAV swarm and a car platoon consists of intelligent mobile and wireless devices with sensors and actuators. Software-defined centralized and hierarchical network control becomes more beneficial than traditional distributed and ad hoc management for enhancing performance, scalability, and flexibility of HIoT management. However, security issues for a software-defined HIoT have not been explored well. Specifically, a wormhole attack is one of the most challenging yet detrimental security issues in HIoT. The existing security countermeasures are designed mainly for wired networks using topologies, but a software-defined HIoT cannot directly use them.This paper proposes a Wormhole attack Analysis using the Neighbor Discovery (WAND) approach as a novel wormhole countermeasure in Software-defined HIoT. As WAND discovers the similarity of neighbor counts at a centralized controller, it detects wormholes not only without requiring any particular location information but also without causing significant communication and coordination overhead. WAND also countermeasures various false-positive and false-negative scenarios generated by the discovery protocol vulnerability. We performed extensive studies via both analysis and simulations. Our simulation results show that WAND can efficiently detect various intelligent worm-hole attacks, keeping low false-positive and false-negative rates.