Enhancing the Security of Wireless Sensor Networks: Mitigating Wormhole Attacks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being used more and more in a variety of application fields, such as environmental monitoring, military operations and smart infrastructure. However, their decentralized architecture and limited resources expose them to a variety of security threats. Among these, wormhole attacks are a critical threat to wireless sensor networks, particularly in hierarchical routing architectures. In this paper, we address this vulnerability in the context of the Equitable Distribution Energy (EDE) protocol, a modified version of LEACH that introduces a transfer node (TN) responsible for data transfer between the cluster head (CH) and the base station (BS). We propose a three-level lightweight security mechanism comprising temporal packet leashes, trust-based neighbor verification and lightweight authentication. This layered defense effectively detects and mitigates wormhole attacks while preserving energy efficiency inherent to LEACH. A simulation implemented in Python in the Google Colab environment demonstrates the improved resilience and energy performance of the proposed approach.