A novel secure DV-Hop localization algorithm against wormhole attacks

IoT era and its ubiquitous sensing raise serious security challenges such as wormhole attacks. Given that these attacks may affect the location determination of the employed sensors, security can be seriously compromised. The most common and severe attack is the single wormhole one, which is the focus of this paper. One of the most employed algorithms to approach the sensor location determination is the Distance Vector Hop (DV-Hop) algorithm, which can still be seriously affected from wormhole attacks. To overcome the challenges of this algorithm, this article proposes a novel secure DV-Hop localization algorithm against wormhole attack (ANDV-Hop), where beacon nodes delegate their attacked neighboring nodes to broadcast data messages, and the intersection of communication range of these neighboring nodes does include wormhole nodes. For implicit attacks, close nodes to the wormhole node are selected in order to broadcast data messages, whilst the nodes within the attack range remove beacon nodes at the other end of the link from the neighboring list. For explicit wormhole attack, the algorithm employs a trust model that calculates the comprehensive trust value obtained via a selection reward/punish coefficient. The selected ones within the intersection zone are considered rewarded, whilst the ones to be removed are classified as punished. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves detection success rate, reduces relative localization error and energy loss, showing effectiveness and reliability.