Abstract— We propose the first practical solution to the longstanding problem of secure wireless routing in the presence of colluding attackers. Our secure routing protocol, Sprout1 , continuously tries new routes to the destination. Routes are probabilistically generated, with complete disregard for performance metrics. This makes Sprout uniquely resilient to attack: it cannot be tempted by shortcuts. In order to avoid compromised routes, and to ensure good overall performance, the quality of each active route is monitored by means of signed endto-end acknowledgments. The amount of traffic sent on each route is adjusted accordingly. Sprout effectively mitigates the vast majority of known routing layer attacks, even when under assault from a large number of colluding attackers. Experiments on our 31-node testbed demonstrates the real-world performance of Sprout in terms of packet delivery ratio, round-trip times and TCP throughput. Our security analysis and simulation results show ...
Jakob Eriksson, Michalis Faloutsos, Srikanth V. Kr