Abstract: MANET has more security issues compared to wired networks. Among all of security threads wormhole attack is considered to be a very serious security thread over MANET. In wormhole attack, two selfish nodes which is geographically very far away to each other, form a tunnel between each other to hide their actual location and try to believe that they are true neighbors and therefore make conversation through the wormhole tunnel. Consequently, the two selfish nodes will completely disrupt the communication channel. In this paper, a new model is developed for detection and prevention of wormholes based hop-count metric which we call it BT-WAP. BT-WAP effectively and efficiently isolates both wormhole node and colluding node. Our model allows the evaluation of node behavior on a pre-packet basis and without the need for more energy consumption or computation-expensive techniques. We show via simulation that BT-WAP successfully avoids misbehaving nodes. It is found that the BT-WAP model achieves an acceptable detection rate about 99.7% and a detection accuracy rate 98.4%. which makes BT-WAP an attractive choice for MANET environments.

Keywords: MANET, wormhole attack, network security, hop-count, range-free, localization.