A wormhole attack is one of the most critical and challenging security threats for wireless sensor networks because of its nature and ability to perform concealed malicious activities. This paper proposes an innovative wormhole detection scheme to detect wormhole attacks using computational intelligence and an artificial neural network (ANN). Most wormhole detection schemes reported in the literature assume the sensors are uniformly distributed in a network, and, furthermore, they use statistical and topological information and special hardware for their detection. However, these schemes may perform poorly in non-uniformly distributed networks, and, moreover, they may fail to defend against “out of band” and “in band” wormhole attacks. The aim of the proposed research is to develop a detection scheme that is able to detect all kinds of wormhole attacks in both uniformly and non-uniformly distributed sensor networks. Furthermore, the proposed research does not require any special hardware and causes no significant network overhead throughout the network. Most importantly, the probable location of the malicious nodes can be identified by the proposed ANN based detection scheme. We evaluate the efficacy of the proposed detection scheme in terms of detection accuracy, false positive rate, and false negative rate. The performance of the proposed algorithm is also compared with other machine learning techniques (i.e. SVM and regularized nonlinear logistic regression (LR) based detection models). The simulation results show that proposed ANN based algorithm outperforms the SVM or LR based detection schemes in terms of detection accuracy, false positive rate, and false negative rates.
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