Robustness of DTN against routing attacks

Abstract

In this work, we study robustness of DTN routing in the absence of authentication. We identify conditions for an attack to be effective and present an attack based on a combination of targeted flooding and acknowledgement counterfeiting that is highly effective even with only a small number of attackers. Simulation results show that delivery ratio decrease by 30% to 50% using only 2 attackers for the two mobility patterns studied (Haggle and DieselNet). We observe that minimum hop count for packet delivery has a strong influence on the robustness of the DTN routing protocols. Generally, attacks become increasingly effective when the minimum hop count required increases. Further, use of global routing metadata in the routing protocol also increases attack effectiveness. Our study provides insights to the robustness of routing attacks in different DTNs settings and can be useful to DTN designers who want to choose the appropriate level of security that is needed for their respective scenarios.