Surviving attacks on disruption-tolerant networks without authentication

Disruption-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) deliver data in network environments composed of intermittently connected nodes. Just as in traditional networks, malicious nodes within a DTN may attempt to delay or destroy data in transit to its destination. Such attacks include dropping data, flooding the network with extra messages, corrupting routing tables, and counterfeiting network acknowledgments. Many existing methods for securing routing protocols require authentication supported by mechanisms such as a public key infrastructure, which is difficult to deploy and operate in a DTN, where connectivity is sporadic. Furthermore, the complexity of such mechanisms may dissuade node participation so strongly that potential attacker impacts are dwarfed by the loss of contributing participants. In this paper, we use connectivity traces from our UMass DieselNet project and the Haggle project to quantify routing attack effectiveness on a DTN that lacks security. We introduce plausible attackers and ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: MOBIHOC
• Authors: John Burgess, George Dean Bissias, Mark D. Corner, Brian Neil Levine
• Keywords: MOBIHOC 2007, Network Protocols, Nodes Reduces Delivery, Potential Attacker Impacts, Wireless Networks