A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a self organizing, infrastructure less, multi-hop network. The wireless and distributed nature of MANETs poses a great challenge to system security designers. Ad hoc networks are by nature very open to anyone. Anyone with the proper hardware and knowledge of the network topology and protocols can connect to the network. This allows potential attackers to infiltrate the network and carry out attacks on its participants with the purpose of stealing or altering information. A specific type of attack, the Wormhole attack does not require exploiting any nodes in the network and can interfere with the route establishment process. It does not require any cryptographic primitives. This attack targets specifically routing control packets, the nodes that are close to the attackers are shielded from any alternative routes with more than one or two hops to the remote location. All routes are thus directed to the wormhole established by the attackers. The entire routing system in MANET can even be brought down using the wormhole attack. We have presented several existing techniques to detect wormhole attack in mobile ad hoc networks.
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