On the Survivability of Routing Protocols in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Survivable routing protocols are able to provide service in the presence of attacks and failures. The strongest attacks that protocols can experience are attacks where adversaries have full control of a number of authenticated nodes that behave arbitrarily to disrupt the network, also referred to as Byzantine attacks. This work examines the survivability of ad hoc wireless routing protocols in the presence of several Byzantine attacks: black holes, flood rushing, wormholes and overlay network wormholes. Traditional secure routing protocols that assume authenticated nodes can always be trusted, fail to defend against such attacks. Our protocol, ODSBR, is an on-demand wireless routing protocol able to provide correct service in the presence of failures and Byzantine attacks. We demonstrate through simulation its effectiveness in mitigating such attacks. Our analysis of the impact of these attacks versus the adversary’s effort gives insights into their relative strengths, their interaction and their importance when designing wireless routing protocols.