A Queuing Mechanism to Alleviate Flooding Attacks in Probabilistic Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract

Probabilistic routing protocols in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) make use of the mobility history in its prediction when making a forwarding decision. However, the predictive property can expose DTN to more advanced security threats. One security threat is enhanced flooding attack which can be more penetrative if properly planned as malicious nodes have prior knowledge of their victims. However, through the investigation of various flooding techniques, we propose to capitalize this very probabilistic feature to confine and mitigate flooding attacks through a queuing mechanism based on this probabilistic feature. To demonstrate our concept, we formulated a solution for Probabilistic Routing Protocol using History of Encounters and Transitivity (PRoPHET), which is a routing protocol in DTN. The PRoPHET protocol along with our proposed queuing policy does not require global knowledge about the network, and hence is a distributed scheme suitable for DTN.