Thwarting pollution attacks in network coding for delay tolerant mobile social networks

Abstract

We consider Delay Tolerant Mobile Social Networks (DTMSNs), made of wireless nodes with intermittent connections and clustered into social communities. The lack of infrastructure and its reliance on nodes' mobility make routing a challenge. Network Coding (NC) is a generalization of routing and has been shown to bring a number of advantages over routing. We consider the problem of pollution attacks in these networks, that are a very important issue both for NC and for DTMSNs. Our first contribution is to propose a protocol which allows controlling adversary's capacity by combining cryptographic hash dissemination and error-correction to ensure message recovery at the receiver. Our second contribution is the modeling of the performance of such a protection scheme. To do so, we adapt an inter-session NC model based on a fluid approximation of the dissemination process. We provide a numerical validation of the model. We are eventually able to provide a workflow to set the correct parameters and counteract the attacks. We conclude by highlighting how these contributions can help secure a real-world DTMSN application (e.g., a smart-phone app.).