A secure contact protocol for delay tolerant networks

Abstract

Current DTN systems are vulnerable to malicious attacks by compromised nodes taking advantage of the DTN protocols that control how nodes join and leave the backbone. Without addressing such security issues, DTN systems could result in performance degrade, the compromise of message confidentiality and integrity, and denial of service. Thus, effective mechanisms to identify and fix this vulnerability are urgently needed. The objective of this research is to address these issues by identifying DTN system vulnerabilities and potential threats, and providing potential countermeasures. We first illustrate vulnerabilities of the epidemic based contact history propagation protocol and then identify the potential threats to system performance, availability, and integrity as well as countermeasures to prevent such threats existing in DTN networks. A secure contact protocol is developed for DTN network with epidemic based contact history propagation protocol and simulations are conducted to assess its effectiveness on attack detection.