Erasure coding with replication to defend against malicious attacks in DTN

Privacy and security in delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) have been an active research topic in the recent years, especially, as people can be involved in these networks and use their mobile devices to forward each other's messages. Such communications require forwarding algorithms that often include replication or context awareness. In this paper, we study the security impact on specific forwarding protocols in both simulated City Scenario and using real connectivity data traces. We propose a hybrid technique combining Erasure Coding and distributed replication to defend against packet dropping malicious attack. We show that replication-alone technique - that is typically expected to improve performance and robustness - is greatly affected by such simple attacks. We show that an attacker can cause up to 50% drop in the success ratio when compromising about 30% of nodes across various scenarios. We use mobile nodes with different speed, transmission range and processing capability, fixed infrastructure access points in our experiments. Results show that using Erasure Coding and message replication at intermediaries achieves up to 250% improvement in the message success ratio compared to using replication only.