Abstract
During disasters, existing telecommunication infrastructures are often congested or even destroyed. In these situations, mobile devices can form a backup communication network for civilians and emergency services using disruption-tolerant networking (DTN) principles. Unfortunately, such distributed and resource-constrained networks are particularly susceptible to a wide range of attacks such as terrorists trying to cause more harm. In this article, we present <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">RESCUE</i> , a resilient and secure device-to-device communication framework for emergency scenarios that provides comprehensive protection against common attacks. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">RESCUE</i> features a minimalistic DTN protocol that, by design, is secure against notable attacks such as routing manipulations, dropping, message manipulations, blackholing, or impersonation. To further protect against message flooding and Sybil attacks, we present a twofold mitigation technique. First, a mobile and distributed certificate infrastructure particularly tailored to the emergency use case hinders the adversarial use of multiple identities. Second, a message buffer management scheme significantly increases resilience against flooding attacks, even if they originate from multiple identities, without introducing additional overhead. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">RESCUE</i> via large-scale simulations in a synthetic as well as a realistic natural disaster scenario. Our simulation results show that <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">RESCUE</i> achieves very good message delivery rates, even under flooding and Sybil attacks.
Highlights
During floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, nuclear accidents, or terrorist attacks, fast disaster response can save human life, limit environmental damage, and reduce economic loss
We presented RESCUE, a communication framework for resilient and secure disruption-tolerant emergency communication on mobile devices
RESCUE is the first secure emergency communication solution that allows users to join the network during disasters when infrastructure networks are unavailable by deploying mobile authorities in the field
Summary
Hurricanes, earthquakes, nuclear accidents, or terrorist attacks, fast disaster response can save human life, limit environmental damage, and reduce economic loss. RESCUE’s basic communication protocol relies on epidemic routing, authenticated and immutable messages, and an effective acknowledgment processing. This way, common attacks, such as message or routing manipulation, blackholing, or impersonation, are already prevented. As in today’s Internet infrastructure [6], the key challenge is to defend against Denial of Service (DoS) attacks originating from individuals as well as multiple identities (Sybil attack) that flood the network. For this purpose, RESCUE pursues a twofold mitigation technique. RESCUE applies a novel buffer management scheme called source-elastic buckets (SEB)
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