A consensus-based approach to reputational routing in multi-hop networks

Abstract

When it comes to the security of the Internet of Things (IoT), securing their communications is paramount. In multi-hop networks, nodes relay information amongst themselves, opening the data up to tampering by an intermediate device. To detect and avoid such malicious entities, we grant nodes the ability to analyse their neighbours behaviour. Through the use of consensus-based validation, based upon the blockchain's miners, all nodes can agree on the trustworthiness of all devices in the network. By expressing this through a node's reputation, it is possible to identify malicious devices and isolate them from network activities. By incorporating this metric into a multi-hop routing protocol such as AODV, we can influence the path selection process. Instead of defining the best route based upon overall length, we can choose the most reputable path available, thus traversing trustworthy devices. By performing extensive analyses through multiple simulated scenarios, we can identify a decrease in packet drop rates compared to AODV by approximately 48% and 38% when subjected to black hole attacks with 30 and 100 node networks respectively. Furthermore, by subjecting our system to varying degrees of grey holes, we can confirm its adaptability to different types of threats.